Reviewing for The Camden Voyeur, Carmel Shortall says,

Gambaro’s themes of violence, passivity and the dynamics of power are no less relevant today than they were in 1967. Oppressors need the oppressed – those who are habituated to passivity – and the silent who are made complicit because of their silence.

This is a rare chance to see an important play and I can’t recommend this production enough. Go and see it.

Shortall gives special recognition to Rob Witcomb as Lorenzo and Jay Worthy as the ‘genuinely terrifying’ Smiley Man.

Read the full review here.

Jonathan Lovett at The Stage also gives his recommendation:

Into a room virtually made of newspapers (here the truth is as questionable as a dictator’s daily)

comes the bruised sibling, Ignacio (Fred Gray) and so begins a tale of quiet terror punctuated by moments of bizarre humour from the exuberant Witcomb and a fantastically odd double-act of Emile Clarke and Jay Worthy as two policemen referred to in the programme as ‘Nasal Man’ and ‘Smiley Man’.

Receiving a worthy tribute, in its long overdue UK premiere, this atmospheric production succeeds in weaving comedy into menace, and vice versa, helped by Kostas Panagiotou’s evocative score.

Read the full review here.

Don’t miss your opportunity to see this Argentine masterpiece. Tickets are still available through the Theatro Technis.

Listen carefully for your chance to win tickets to the UK premiere and check out their website for special deals!!

We’re offering some great deals on tickets and other goodies through the site so please circulate to any interested parties.

1 male actor: (Lorenzo) mid 30s of Latin American colouring. Knowledge of Spanish and stage fighting would be ideal. Some physical work required. The lead role: strong male, sneaky, manipulative, and childish with violent outbursts.

1 male actor: (Ignacio)  mid 30s of Latin American colouring. Knowledge of Spanish and stage fighting would be ideal. Some physical work required. The lead role: passive male, sensitive, affectionate, innocent.

1 male actor: (Smiley Man) mid 20s. Any colour. Knowledge of Spanish and stage fighting would be ideal. Some physical work required. The head policeman, a caricature, thinks he is smart but is easily outwitted, violent.

1 male actor: (Nasal Man) early 40s. Any colour.  Knowledge of Spanish and stage fighting would be ideal. Some physical work required. A policeman who often speaks through his nose, lazy and indifferent with violent undertones.

1 male actor: (Old Man) late fifties or older. Any colour. Knowledge of Spanish would be ideal. An old man, melancholy, bursts of energy and passion thwarted by the injustice of life.

1 male actor: (Young Man) late teens/early 20s. Any colour.  Knowledge of Spanish would be ideal. A young man, full of hope despite the crumbling world around him.

Please email us if you are interested in auditioning and we will send you the appropriate materials.

Drawing on a variety of physical theatre practices, including Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, carnival, and the practices of Luigi Pirandello and Meyerhold, the Masterclass will introduce participants to the foundations of grotesque theatre and develop these techniques through improvisation and text-based work. Participants will discover the history of Grotesque theatre, and particularlyl the work of Griselda Gambaro, one of the most important and influential figures in contemporary Latin American grotesque theatre. The Masterclass will be led by Jorge Perez Falconi, founder and artistic director of the Festival Internacional de Teatro Carmen (FITCA), and Mara Lockowandt, Artistic Director of the Silver Lining Theatre Company.

Grotesque Masterclass – 19 and 23 July.

Registration now open!!!

In a spirally street from Mornington Crescent, the Theatro Technis proves that the business of theatre is sweeter with Cypriot hospitality. Past the grape vines and bar, the large converted church that is now the Theatro Technis is home to some of the most exciting new theatre in London.

George Eugeniou with Lennie Varvarides from Dys-Pla at the Theatro Technis

My first encounter with the colourful history of the Theatro Technis occurred the other day when I ventured there in search of a home for our production of ‘Siamese Twins’. Our trip to the space lead us to the surprise meeting of George Eugeniou, the Artistic Director as well as his family. His wife greets my colleague Jorge and myself and invites us to make ourselves comfortable in their front room, a beautiful space consisting of solid wood floors and sprawling bookcases. Jorge tells me we can rehearse here, but the allure of the books and fine collection theatrical artifacts would be enough to distract even the biggest of theatre enthusiasts.

We are eventually led up into the house and workspace of artistic director George Eugeniou. At the age of 79 George is still an energetic and sprightly man both commanding the management of the theatre and writing, directing and acting in ongoing productions.

As we sit down to discuss our production George perches on his chair and gives us a sweeping overview of the theatre and what they can offer us. Moments later his son Aris arrives to walk us through the details. The two communicate with us in tandem about the details of the space, website, marketing, and bar. What becomes evident is passion, openness and commitment to new work and artists. Jorge and I throw some curve-ball ideas which George takes up with pleasure and answers each inquiry with a warm smile and an unequivocal yes. At the Theatro Technis it seems anything is possible.

Aris gives us a tour of the premises, with an outdoor patio, bar, theatre, two-story green room and backstage it is clearly one of the largest fringe venues available in London, and with moveable seats and four exits/entrances it is ideal for companies looking to extend their performance possibilities.

My interest in the Eugeniou’s family theatre deepens as casual references to previous work of the theatre and the artistic director creep into causal conversations. George has a long history in the theatre himself, performing with Joan Littlewood in her theatre workshop. However, a youtube search of ‘George Eugeniou’ is more likely to bring up hits of political speeches than artistic projects. He has been an active spokesperson for the Cypriot community in London and has been as active in community campaigns and national politics as his own theatre work. George’s theatrical vision is built upon radical, community-based principles. For him, theatre has a stronger purpose in life than profit and his fifty years of running Technis Teatro and continuing to offer bold new work attest to his dedication to these strong beliefs.

Theatro Technis today

With the Theatro Technis he has helped produce some of London’s most important political work. The Madness of George Dbya (2003), a satire which recasts the American president as Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in a war with Iraq transferred to the West End following its run at the Technis. With Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea the Technis hosted a production which presented the harsh realities of life in the Gaza Strip. More recently, Technis has presented Inferno, a play which places the classic tale of Prometheus within Guantanamo Bay, and The Challenging Tide, a revival of a Greek Cypriot work set in 1930s Athens against the backdrop of WWII and the German occupation of Greece.

With the help of his family and generous volunteers, George has been able to keep his theatre open for over fifty years! Not a bad record considering the competition for theatre events in London. It was a refreshing experience and has certainly confronted my expectations on what a theatre can be.

In this absurd and forceful play, two brothers, one weak, one strong, play out a primalscene of envy, cruelty and torture as the strong exerts his power and aggression over the weak. Involuntarily, the audience finds itself complicit in the brutality witnessed on stage through Gambaro’s command of a powerful and irresistible black humour and the aestheticof the grotesco criollo, an Argentine theatrical tradition of the grotesque. Here the absurd becomes a harrowing metaphor of the most pure and raw reality.

Gwen MacKeith is a translator of fiction, poetry and theatre for performance and haspublished several translations of works from Spain and Spanish America. She has actedas research associate for the AHRC-funded project, Out of the Wings: Spanish and SpanishAmerican Theatres in Translation, http://www.outofthewings.org/, since 2008. Alongside her research into the translation of Hispanic Theatres, she has taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King’s College London.

Gwen is currently collaborating with the Spanish theatre company, Mirage, translatingits critically-acclaimed production of Lázaro which has secured funding to create aproduction in London for an English-speaking audience in the Autumn of 2011. This is astage adaptation of the anonymous sixteenth century picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes (1554).

Learn more about Out of the Wings

Follow on Twitter: #TwinsSLT; @SilverTheatre

Artes Escénicas Rayuela, A.C. emerged in 2000 with the objective of transcending the official character of the arts in Campeche, Mexico. Since then, the group has engaged in the exploration of new means of creation, and contributed to the critique and reflection of the social problems which afflict us. The company has staged plays such as El Camino Rojo a Sabaiba (2000) and Los Negros Pájaros del Adiós (2002) by Oscar Liera; The Pope and the Witch (2003) by Dario Fo; Caracol y Colibrí (2004) by Sabina Berman; and Roberto Zucco (2006) by Bernard-Marie Koltès. With Mujeres Fraguando Sueños (2007) by Pati Doménech, the company was awarded the prize to the Best Supporting Role, and a Mention for the Best Music in the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro, in Mar de Plata, Argentina. In 2009 Rayuela received a grant by the Mexican government to produce Woyzeck, by Georg Büchner. In addition, the group has also toured Spain, Argentina and Cuba. The Festival Internacional de Teatro Carmen emerged in 2001 as an initiative of the company. During its nine editions the festival has hosted groups from countries such as Switzerland, Cuba, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, France, England, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, and engaged in the promotion of arts and intercultural dialogue.

Artistic director, Jorge Perez Falconi is the founder and artistic director of Artes Escénicas Rayuela and founder of  the Festival Internacional de Teatro Carmen (FITCA). He studied Theatre and Drama in The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds a Masters in Theatre (Directing) from Royal Holloway, University of London. Jorge helped in the organisation of the International Puppet Festival in Mexico City from 1994 until 1997 as an assistant director. He also worked as an actor-puppeteer with the MUF Puppet Company touring Asia and Europe in 1997 (Italy, France, Korea, Croatia and Slovenia) and has worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe and taken dance classes both in Mexico and the USA. In addition to his acting. Jorge has participated as both teacher and student in the International Festival of Making Theatre in Athens, Greece. At present he is studying a PhD at the Royal Holloway, University of London, with an investigation on Latin American Festivals.

The Silver Lining Theatre company is looking forward to working with Perez Falconi on the upcoming production The Siamese Twins.

Read more about the production and follow our blog.

Follow on Twitter: #TwinsSLT; @SilverTheatre

Fear Leads to Dreadful Decisions

The fact is that there is only one person who ever survived an honour killing. I do not call it an attempted murder, because she was burned alive and though she survived, more than her skin went up in flames that afternoon. Souad was born and lived for nineteen years in the Israeli occupied West Bank. She was seduced and raped by a man she thought would marry her. When she realized she was pregnant she tried to hide her body of fear from her family. Yet, a few months into her pregnancy her mother found out she was pregnant. Of fear that the community they lived in would take notice they decided to ground Souad until further actions were taken. Her family met and planned her murder while Souad was sitting in the room next door listening to her death sentence. Her brother-in-law set fire on Souad while she was doing her chorus out in the back. She escaped, and was brought to a Hospital. There her family found her and her mother tried to poison her. Her reasoning was that it would bring shame on the family if she survived, and they feared for her brother’s reputation back home. If it were not for Jacqueline who worked at that time for Terre des Hommes, Souad would have not received the medical care she needed. For days her chin was stuck to her chest, and she gave birth without assistance while lying in that hospital bed waiting to die. Though Souad was given a second chance in Switzerland, her story past still affects her present life. With assistance she wrote her autobiography while living abroad and almost on every page we can find the word fear. Fear becomes therefore a very powerful emotion that dictates the patterns of the community, leading to my first premise that Fear leads to dreadful decisions.

In the search of my characters, I was fascinated by specific stories of individual who helped me to create the bone structures of my characters. I knew about the story of Banaz Mahmod, the 19-year-old victim who was a killed in an honour crime. Her case is one of the few well-documented ones. Not only because the media followed her, but because videos made from her cell phone are on Youtube, her sister spoke to the police and the media and last her case was well documented through the long search of her body and the following prosecution of her murderers. I took her story to create a time frame for my play. Banaz was a victim of forced marriage. But, her death sentence started with the day she left her husband and fell in love with another man who was outside of her tribe. There are stories of girls who were caught in flagranti, or daughters who run away, but it is a fact that more than seventy percent of honour crimes committed are based on the suspicion of the girl having committed a ‘shameful act’ to the family.6 Most honour crimes committed happen outside of the UK. Though statistics place the number at 12-15 per year in the UK, officials are convinced that more crimes happen off the radar, which is also the reason why prosecuting these cases is so difficult.7 As I am writing this I come to remember that an article I read states that most crimes happen over the summer. Girls are lured or invited to travel home to their native countries and there they become victims of forced marriages, female genital mutilations and honour crimes. As schools will commence after the summer dozens of girls will be missing in the UK.

One of the first widely documented cases of an honour crime was in 1980. British journalist and documentary filmmaker Anthony Thomas made the murder of Saudi Princess Misha’al Bint Bin Mohammed in 1977 into a docu-drama, which led to diplomatic problems between Saudi Arabia and the UK. Since 1980 the film has not been aired anymore, and I was not able to retrieve in from the UK, Germany or Egypt.

When researching the princess I found the recurring problem that no information seemed to be really supported by facts. There are articles stating that she and her lover were murdered on a car park in Jeddah, others say that she was killed at the airport in Saudi Arabia coming back for her term break from Lebanon where she attended the American University in Beirut and her boyfriend was murdered the same day somewhere else, and others again state that she was taken in front of a judge where she repeated three times the phrase “I have committed adultery” and then executed. Fact is that there is more of he said she said then anything else and solid facts are missing. One could assume that the docu- drama of Thomas would give some answers, yet the reason why the film was converted from a documentary into a docu-drama was that most eye witnesses did not want to appear on camera. Considering this her death is more of a myth and legend now then anything else and finding the truthful answer to what happened on that day to the 19 year old Princess of Saudi Arabia in the year 1977 will never be answered. In my first drafts the Princess was not a character, but somehow she was always part of my reference. I later chose to incorporate her realizing that the issue of honor crimes and its long history of documentation has to be brought to attention.

Banaz case and the case of the Princess were very helpful in understanding how the women are dealt with. How their actions lead to an aftermath that could hardly be foreseen by anybody who was not raised in the same culture and community. Most articles and cases you find are specifically speaking of the women. Her actions that led to the murder. None of them really give you an insight into the emotions and understandings of those who commit the crime. Fortunately in the late summer of 2008 Ayse Onal published a book called Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed. Onal is a Turkish journalist, who has been blacklisted, shot at and threatened by fundamentalist group for her political and social work within Turkey and the Middle East. She has been awarded with numerous awards, such as the Courage in Journalism award for her outstanding work. For her most recent book which I have used to find the men who kill, she visited over a period of time prisons in Turkey and spoke to ten men who have killed their wives, sisters and sometimes even own mothers. There is no point in going into all stories, but it is worth mentioning that the book is worth reading, for you learn also a lot about yourself whilst reading the book. In the book you are reading about men describing their gruesome murders, what led to them, the deed itself and the reasoning and argumentation that lies behind the act to murder a relative for not obeying the rules of the community. Onal’s writing is very good, and if it was fiction you would read the book in one evening. Yet, knowing that these men are non-fictional makes reading the book very difficult. The problem is that I did not really hate them. I was not appalled or disgusted. All of them admit their crime, most of them feel remorse that they had to kill their loved ones, some of them do not feel anything it seems and a couple of cases take the interview with Onal as their confession-often the first. I noticed when reading that I did not hate the men. It was not really compassion I felt, but, and I am scared to admit this to myself, there was understanding in me. None of the men in the book have the urge to defend themselves; they do not intentionally justify their actions. What they are doing is simply explaining what they did, and I have to admit to myself that in their logic what they did makes completely sense. Some things are not to be categorized with labels such as right or wrong. Indeed there is no grey zone, but there are circumstances, social and historical circumstances, which should rationalize the behaviour to others. In regards of the backstory, most men told the same story. Their backgrounds are similar and their motivations are the same. Key issues were always the honor of the family, which is defined through the females of the family, and the family, tribe or larger community who plays an active role in the prosecution of the victim.

The core of the conflict lies in the understanding of honor and the role and influence of the larger family, which is not related through blood but location. Gender, race and class are core attributes to create and find characters as much as to define victims and offenders. Yet, those three sociological modes are part of culture. When taking this into context the conflict becomes clearer and understanding motivations that lead to those dreadful decisions appear to be obvious.

EXPRESSIONS AND SPACES OF AUTONOMY: MINDS, BODIES, AND THE VISIBILITY OF YOUNG IRANIAN WOMEN IN TRANSITION

Mehri Honarbin-Holliday (2009)

Self knowledge, criticality, agency, resistance, autonomy, and intention to change the location of Self and effect change in Society are part of gendered existences which the predominant majority of Iranian women address individually in daily life, and collectively engaging in political campaigns. Such an address might be simply maintaining a visible presence in the public sphere, on the move in public transport, related to the dress codes and their adjustment, expressions of body presentation and body ownership, the determination to continue to be educated, to further develop the means to be employed and economically independent, and to reach for a vision of equality in the work place and legal system. It might also be in contemplation of the young women’s place within the family, articulating and demanding change of perceptions about women by male relatives whether fathers, brothers, husbands,
and uncles.

Apart from the history of the Iranian women’s movement articulating itself around the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911), with a chain of interruptions, young women’s desire to be educated is highly significant in contemplating change in society in contemporary Iran. Despite recommendations from the clerical elements within the government and the discussion of considering a limited quota for women accessing higher education by such elements, over 65% of the three million strong student body in higher education in Iran are female. Further, the completion of secondary school by girls in both rural and urban areas having superseded boys by several percents for the first time in the country to over 82%, suggests a significant turn in education for girls at the grassroots.1 As a result, the desire for change is finding its shape in a discourse of civil society, citizenship, and civic legal structure. This discourse is articulated through a range of personal and collective campaigns, amongst which is the One Million Signature Campaign for Change. The discourse is in essence a form of opposition to the rule of hardline clerics and their following who symbolize systems of patriarchy in Iran, including the government. The One Million Signature Campaign for Change thus focuses on change of law for equality between men and women, revisiting especially those aspects of the Family Law in Islamic Shari’a and Jurisprudence which subordinate women. The recognition and equal legal status for women, they campaign argues, is essential both at home in relation to the well being of individual women, their children, and society, whether as mothers or working women. This is as well as the vision Iran holds for its place in the world at large within the global community. This vision is not against Islam, rather it is a way of analyzing aspects of Islam according to the demands of contemporary life and thought.

In practice, contemporary life, the place of education, the development of an independent mind, the existence of the cyberspace and all that it can offer, the need for economical independence even if only to have material power, brings with it a chain of ideas. Some of these ideas and practices seem to be paradoxical to the environment the young women find themselves whether resulted from governmental policies, legal system, and societal traditions firmly in place for centuries. Notwithstanding such challenging paradox, campaigns for change can only flourish. For ideas will not be locked away, and sooner or later they will become part of the air breathed in society, and tools for change. At present, the knowledge of both one’s location as a citizen, and the condition of the society where one lives are amongst the critical and reflexive questions women posit in order to clarify ‘who’ and ‘how’ they wish to be.

Honarbin-Holliday’s book Becoming Visible in Iran: Women in Contemporary Iranian Society was published in 2008 and is available on Amazon.