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Khojaly: A Play About Surviving
St
Paul's Covent Garden and Union Theatre Spring 2022
A war little known in the West and the mass killing of civilians on one
side by irregular forces on the other, supported by the Soviet Union, is
the subject of Nick Awde's new play.
There's a point in Khojaly
where the characters open a bag filled with question cards and read out
one that asks whether they feel hatred for those who carried out the
massacre they survived three decades ago.
'If there's justice…' comes one reply, 'I’m ready to close my eyes to all
that they did. But the people who led them, the people who led them...
they should face justice.'
It's one of many powerful moments in a play that's a grim, timely mirror
to hold up to the violence currently unleashed by Russia against Ukraine
and its civilian population.
Scripted by Awde from direct interviews with civilians from the besieged
town of Khojaly during the brutal Nargorno-Karabakh War in 1992, this
Debunk Theatre production tells six stories of a freezing February night
in 1992 as people tried to flee the gunfire and shelling of a complex
post-Soviet ethnic conflict.
The accounts are harrowing, but there’s an unexpected human side to the
inhumanity as characters describe their life before it was taken away.
They tell us what they did –
librarian, accountant, housewife, club manager, doctor – as they play
games and swap tales of growing up to paint a living portrait of a vibrant
community united by weddings, picking flowers on Cosmonaut’s Day and the
month-long festival of Novruz (New Year) celebrating earth, fire, water
and air.
As the memories unfold it becomes crystal clear how the loss of lives of
their family and friends in the massacre that they somehow survived also
becomes a loss of the community.
The survivors do what they can
to keep together, while stoically acknowledging the walls of personal
trauma and the reality of being scattered as internally displaced people,
refugees in their own land, unable to go home.
Documentary theatre can often sacrifice drama for the weight of factual
reality, something that Awde’s script resolves with a fruitful three-act
approach that avoids linear storytelling or the easy option of emotional
appeal (in a conflict where the authorities on both sides have overdone
themselves in ruthlessly rewriting history, with their unholy neighbour
Russia pulling both sets of strings).
Indeed it’s a superb, energetic cast at the Actors' Church that convinces
with every word and gesture. Azzurra Caccetta, Sami Kali, Maria Karelina,
Shiraz Khan, Kevin Mesiti and Behnaz Vakili are a tightly focused ensemble
who bring a humanity and depth to channel these real-life stories with a
dignity that transcends theatre.
Director Vicky Moran has created an insightful many-levelled palette that
drive the six performers to compelling interactions in what could
otherwise end up a static series of monologues, exploring the complexities
of memory, identity and blame against the backdrop of unimaginable trauma.
Moran does not take the easy
route of othering the survivors as simply victims. Instead she shows how
the characters are empowered to tell their stories within the context of
being ordinary human beings. It could happen to you, this could be your
story.
Visualising this is Jon Stacey’s subtle lighting which plays over Sorcha
Corcoran’s stark stone-grey set, dominated by pillars over which play
projections of contemporary footage, while Hannah Williams’ greatcoats and
shawls evocatively capture the style of the era and region.
The play is a testament to the reality of how the the price for the
manoeuvring of superpowers is the deaths of ordinary people, and yet it
also bears witness to the universality of hope in a world that still
experiences violence and murder as a way of governing.
In using theatre to
unflinchingly communicate this, Khojaly deserves to move on from this run
to tour wherever that message can be heard.
Ted
Gill
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Review of Khojaly - Union Theatre 2022