Oh My Sweet Land

Description

They call it a civil war, but there is nothing civil in this. Nothing civil at all. They came from Damascus, from Halab, from Banias where the bombs fall day and night and the wounded children look like sleeping angels. Now they live in camps and abandoned buildings in Lebanon or Jordan. Now Syria is just a distant memory, a home forever lost. This urgent and extraordinary play explores the crisis in Syria through the stories of its two million refugees. Oh My Sweet Land received its UK premiere at the Young Vic Theatre, London, on 9 April 2014.

Amir Nizar Zuabi trained as an actor at the Nisan Nativ drama studio and is a founder of the ShiberHur Company. As a director, theatre work includes Alive from Palestine, When the World was Green (Young Vic); Stories Under Occupation (Al Kassaba, Ramallah); Voligo Andare In Prigone (Collosseo Theatre, Rome); Jidaria - Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian National Theatre); Forget Herostratous; Tale of Autumn (Al Midan, Haifa); War or More, Sneeze and Other Shorts (ShiberHur); Samson and Delilah (Vlamsse Opera House). As a writer, work includes Clinging on Stone; Album; War or More; I am Yusuf and This Is My Brother; and The Beloved.

The desperate plight of Syria's two million refugees is searingly and sensitively communicated in this one-woman show . . . * Independent * Nizar Zuabi's script is poetic in its descriptions . . . and occasionally we are jolted into the violent reality of what is happening. * Time Out London * . . . extraordinary piece . . . the writing acquires a literary self-consciousness . . . As so often, the theatre shows its capacity to take an event that is constantly in the headlines and give it a recognisable human face. * Guardian * Truth and fiction intermingle in . . . Amir Nizar Zuabi's text . . . Zuabi's poetic text makes them [the stories] as fragrant as the food . . . It's a cri de coeur, not a call to arms. * Daily Telegraph * Zuabi writes with spare poeticism . . . * Sunday Times * The writing offsets brutality with tenderness and flashes of humour . . . the narrative is vivid. Scenes of ordinary domesticity collide with horrific violence, and life hinges on the absurdities of chance, amid a riot of images . . . This, in the end, is the plays achievement: to thrust before our eyes a clutch of unforgettable snapshots from the bloody heart of devastation. * The Times *