- It is the city of the cold and hungry,
echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire.
There are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off.
- In The Eruptive Mode came out of very much a feeling of hope and helplessness
in front of the massive events that were taking place,
that were the so-called Arab Spring,
a series of people's revolutions across different parts of the Arab region.
- "Never again," we said.
"No more humanity in extremis," we said.
Let the IVF begin.
- The last piece of work that we made was being rehearsed in Syria,
and it was a piece of despair,
it was a cry of despair that nothing is ever gonna change.
And as we were in Syria, the whole Arab Spring started, Ben Ali left,
so we found ourselves in a radically different place
that we never dreamed of being in.
So we created a piece and we worked with actors from Syria and from Lebanon.
But it became increasingly difficult to tour that piece,
as you can imagine, getting the actors out, it was very dangerous.
And so when we were invited to perform at the Sydney Festival,
we'd been working on this new piece which was a much lighter piece,
and something in English, which was something we were very keen to do.
- And that also led to the idea of
incorporating a local performer into the work,
which, in fact, here is being played by Kym Vercoe beautifully.
- Didn't know you were allowed laments in collapsed buildings.
(RUMBLING)
Musafa! Did you press send?
(RUMBLING)
- The lines that are being drawn here are very fine.
There are a series of monologues.
It's a much more intimate piece
in which individuals are cast into extreme scenarios,
as one would expect from the set-up required of a tragedy.
- There's two foreign characters actually,
both played by a wonderful Australian actress who's with us now.
The first is the journalist character,
and it's based on a western journalist who is killed while reporting,
either in Libya or in Syria,
in one of the countries where the uprisings
have gone beyond revolution into civil war.
And the second character is actually one of these shady characters
you see often in the Gulf, the western advisors.
And we wanted to include a voice from a region that hadn't had a revolution,
or where revolution has been suppressed, and a western ally.
So we've got two very different voices,
one who's reporting what's going on and another who's essentially a parasite.
- And you said there wasn't enough wood for the coffins yesterday,
so the locals took to burying their infants
in schoolbags.
- The issue in many of the Arab states
that fed a lot of the despair and rage that led to these popular movements
was that it was governed by an outdated, autocratic system of oppression.
(MAN SINGS IN ARABIC)
- But it was important for us in the piece
to explore, I suppose, more than one side of the coin.
And theatre is also a space
that is ultimately a utopic space of freedom.
- The icy, intravenous river gushes up the claw
and unbuttons the vertical vision.
- But what I really hope is that people will see the poetry in this
and that these are just... these are individual voices caught,
ordinary people caught in the storm of what is happening.
I hope that we allow them into a human story.
And I think that a lot of the time
the Muslim or the Arab is demonised in the West.
- It's important for us that that theatre is engaging and provocative,
and that's kind of what makes
making theatre in the Arab world also so exciting.
And also feeds a thirst, I would say,
for theatre that is very strong.