A thoughtful contemporary reimagining of Aeschylus’ Suppliants, Border Crossings’ production blends testimony and live performance to explore asylum and displacement. While humane and politically urgent, the connection between ancient text and modern narrative occasionally feels conceptually uneven.Rating
Good
Some stories resist the language of “issue-based theatre” because the stakes are not abstract — they are human. Supplicants of Syria does not ask for sympathy; it asks for witness. Developed through collaboration with Syrian refugee women in Turkey, the production places first-hand testimony at its centre, reframing displacement not as headline but as lived psychological reality. It is difficult to watch without thinking how familiar this cycle has become — Syria, and now Gaza — as if human catastrophe is something the world absorbs and then quietly moves on from.
A contemporary reimagining of Aeschylus’ Suppliants — the first known drama to confront the politics of asylum — the work draws a deliberate line between ancient plea and modern border. Filmed testimonies intertwine with live performance, music, movement and poetry, creating a dialogue across time, gender and geography. Rather than offering a linear narrative, the production builds through accumulation: fragments of memory and experience layered until the emotional weight becomes impossible to ignore.
Where the production occasionally struggles is in its attempt to braid the ancient and the contemporary into a single narrative thread. The framing device — actors mediating between Aeschylus’ Suppliants and the testimonies of Syrian women — is intellectually compelling, but at times the relationship between the two feels more implied than fully realised. The ancient text risks becoming a distant reference point rather than an active dramatic partner, leaving moments where the conceptual bridge between past and present feels slightly lost in translation.
The performances by Tobi King Bakare, Vlad Gurdis and Albie Marber are rooted in presence rather than display. They do not attempt to impersonate the women whose voices appear on screen; instead, they create a live response — listening, echoing, challenging and amplifying. This restraint is crucial. Trauma is not aestheticised or consumed; it is held. Silence is used as deliberately as speech, and in the intimacy of Hoxton Hall the audience cannot retreat into distance. You are not observing crisis from afar — you are sharing space with it.
What gives the piece its ethical force is its attention to dignity. Anger sits alongside humour, grief alongside resilience. The work recognises that survival is not triumph but negotiation — between memory and future, self and circumstance. By weaving multimedia elements with embodied performance, Border Crossings resists both spectacle and simplification, offering sustained attention to voices too often reduced to policy debate.
Ultimately, Supplicants of Syria is not theatre you ‘enjoy’ in the conventional sense; it is theatre you carry with you. By returning to Aeschylus while foregrounding contemporary testimony, the production reminds us that asylum is not a new crisis but a recurring human reality. What lingers is not spectacle but responsibility — the uncomfortable recognition that witnessing demands something of us in return.
Developed in collaboration with Syrian refugee women in Turkey
Inspired by Aeschylus’ Suppliants
Artistic Director: Michael Walling
Associate Director: Lucy Dunkerley
Producer (Turkey): Ilke Sanlier
Video Artist: Kıvanç Türkgeldi
Music by Dave Carey
Movement by Maria da Luz Ghoumrassi
Supplicants of Syria plays at Hoxton Hall until Sunday 8 March.
