Goats by Liwaa Yazji
Dec. 23rd, 2017 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anefWe went to the Royal Court theatre yesterday to see Goats.
Goats is a new play set in a village in Syria. The war has been going on for years. The young men of the village go off to fight "terrorists" and return as "martyrs". News filters back about the fighting, what happened, how people died. And then there are the phone calls from the young men at the front. The schoolteacher wants to see inside his son's coffin, and Al-Tayyib, the local Party leader, refuses. A Party initiative presents a goat to each dead soldier's family.
The goats appear on stage. They are real, live goats. They provide comic relief and a distraction, both to the villagers and the audience.
It's a messy play, and not wholly successful. There isn't enough differentiation between the characters. There's a lot of declaiming. There isn't a plot, as such. Things happen and gradually we start to understand the horrors that are going on under the propaganda, and the horror of the villagers' lives, trapped in a situation over which they have no control, their children offered up as sacrifices to the war machine, with no prospect of an ending.
And yet I shouldn't perhaps expect coherence. To someone brought up on the forward momentum of Western drama, the plotlessness makes it seem incoherent, but perhaps it's my expectations that are wrong. The absence of a "hero" means that there is no central character, or every character is central at different times. Perhaps I should be thinking of it more of a soap opera where different people become the focus of the drama in turn.
The Guardian review here https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/nov/28/goats-martyr-surreal-cost-syria-civil-war-liwaa-yazji-royal-court makes it sound more coherent than it was, but there's also an interview with the writer which is well worth reading.
It's wasn't an uplifting play, and there was no resolution, no reconciliation. The war goes on, the propaganda continues. And yet, the presence of the goats on-stage is going to stay with me for a long time. Their warmth and physicality provided a counterpoint to the awfulness of the human experience.
Goats is a new play set in a village in Syria. The war has been going on for years. The young men of the village go off to fight "terrorists" and return as "martyrs". News filters back about the fighting, what happened, how people died. And then there are the phone calls from the young men at the front. The schoolteacher wants to see inside his son's coffin, and Al-Tayyib, the local Party leader, refuses. A Party initiative presents a goat to each dead soldier's family.
The goats appear on stage. They are real, live goats. They provide comic relief and a distraction, both to the villagers and the audience.
It's a messy play, and not wholly successful. There isn't enough differentiation between the characters. There's a lot of declaiming. There isn't a plot, as such. Things happen and gradually we start to understand the horrors that are going on under the propaganda, and the horror of the villagers' lives, trapped in a situation over which they have no control, their children offered up as sacrifices to the war machine, with no prospect of an ending.
And yet I shouldn't perhaps expect coherence. To someone brought up on the forward momentum of Western drama, the plotlessness makes it seem incoherent, but perhaps it's my expectations that are wrong. The absence of a "hero" means that there is no central character, or every character is central at different times. Perhaps I should be thinking of it more of a soap opera where different people become the focus of the drama in turn.
The Guardian review here https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/nov/28/goats-martyr-surreal-cost-syria-civil-war-liwaa-yazji-royal-court makes it sound more coherent than it was, but there's also an interview with the writer which is well worth reading.
It's wasn't an uplifting play, and there was no resolution, no reconciliation. The war goes on, the propaganda continues. And yet, the presence of the goats on-stage is going to stay with me for a long time. Their warmth and physicality provided a counterpoint to the awfulness of the human experience.
