About this episode

Arwa Omaren discusses her journey as a refugee from Syria and the parallels with the ancient story of Hecuba at the Edinburgh Fringe.

What happens to a person when the country they were born in decides they were never really from there? What does a play about the women of a sacked city, written 2,400 years ago, have to say to an actress walking out of Syria on foot? And how do you stand on a stage in Edinburgh and make an audience laugh about the worst thing that ever happened to you? At the Edinburgh Fringe, Peter Frankopan meets Arwa Omaren, whose one-woman show sets her own escape from Syria inside the story of Hecuba, Queen of Troy — along with William Stirling and Charlotte Eagar, who have spent a decade staging Euripides with refugees. Arwa Omaren found out she was a refugee at twelve, in a playground fight in Damascus. She graduated top of her class from Syria's leading drama school in 2011, signed a television contract, and then the war took all of it. She walked for five weeks through the mountains of Kurdistan. Britain granted her asylum, then she was evicted, and she slept on the street with her dog. Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? is what she made of it. Euripides wrote the first play about refugees in 415 BC, the year after Athens massacred the people of Melos. Twenty-four centuries later it is…

People in this episode

Host: Peter Frankopan

Guest: Arwa Omaren

Topics covered

• refugee experience
• theater
• exile
• cultural commentary
• historical parallels

Keywords

• refugee
• Syria
• Hecuba
• Edinburgh Fringe
• theater
• exile
• cultural commentary

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Hecuba, Queen of Troy, Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country?

Places: Syria, Britain, Edinburgh

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