Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 15

THE BRITISH COUNCIL AND THE POWER OF THEATRE
In a similar vein, David Greig returned to Aeschylus autumn of 2017 at the Lyceum The-
atre in Edinburgh. He’s directed a new version of Aeschylus’s The Suppliant Women (with
an amateur community group and reconstituted authentic Greek Aulos music). 2 It was a
chillingly familiar tale of refugee women seeking political asylum in Greece from war in
the Middle East—who says history doesn’t repeat itself?!
Figure 6: The Suppliant Women, Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh
Theatre can also tackle subjects that are considered “taboo”, a bit like my earlier Solomon
Islands example. Take a play called Roadkill, about human trafficking, based on the ex-
periences of a young woman trafficked to Scotland from Benin City. It was first produced
at the Edinburgh Festival in 2013 and was part of the British Council’s Edinburgh Show-
case, a biennial platform of contemporary UK performance selected by us and external
advisers for the Fringe and ultimately, we hope, for international dates. I’m pleased to say
that, as a direct result, the play toured to the US, another country blighted by this serious
issue. The performance experience was powerful—an audience of around 25, driven off
to a dilapidated house on the outskirts of Edinburgh, installed in a small living room,
where the action took place right at your feet. Impossible not to be moved, impossible
not to feel empathy, impossible not to emerge with your mind and attitude changed to
the plight of such women.
Exploring similar themes was South African director Yael Farber’s acclaimed play Nir-
bhaya—the story of the young Delhi woman who was gang-raped and left for dead. This
searing story premiered in Edinburgh a year or so ago and won the coveted Amnesty
International Freedom of Expression Award, given to a Fringe show which raises aware-
ness of human rights. We were able to support a tour of Nirbhaya to India, despite ner-
vousness from the UK Foreign Office, and it met with a similar reaction to the global
problem of sexual violence: how can societies across the world tackle it?
2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZZ07U-yOcM
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