A co-production with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, Nottingham Playhouse and UK Productions, this new theatrical adaptation of Christy Lefteri’s powerful novel The Beekeeper of Aleppo was written by Matthew Spangler, reuniting a combination of stage writer and producers that brought us the immensely successful The Kite Runner a decade ago. It has taken much longer than anticipated to reach the stage, due to the pandemic, bringing added poignancy in its timing due to the recent earthquakes to hit the already war torn Aleppo.
Inspired by Lefteri’s work in a refugee centre in Greece, the story takes us from Syria to Athens and to a B&B in England. The narrative has a timeline that bounces back and forth constantly, so that these locations are visited in a dizzying sequence of juxtaposed scenes. We are following the journey of Nuri and Afra, husband and wife, a beekeeper and an artist, who are displaced from their idyllic Aleppo home by the war.
The play opens near its end, with Nuri facing a barrage of questions from immigration officials in England, but he stops the dialogue in its tracks and we are transported back to a time when life was happy, and he was learning how to take care of bees.
From here onward we are hurtled through time and across continents. While focusing on the events that befall this one family, it seeks to tell a broader story highlighting the plight of all those who had to flee their homeland and seek refuge in other countries. Occasionally there are conversations with other families they meet along the way, which help us to extrapolate mentally outwards from the personal story to that of a nation.
The central performances by Alfred Clay and Roxy Faridany as Nuri and Afra are very fine indeed. Clay carries much of the weight of the narration as well as being Nuri, whilst Faridany does a remarkable job of shifting between a blinded Afra in the later time period to her sighted self before the tragedies that befell her. Elham Mahyoub touchingly plays Mohammed, a little boy who the couple rescue and take care of. Mohammed becomes almost a surrogate for the son that they lost in the bomb attack which became the key turning point in their lives. Meanwhile Joseph Long is larger than life in his portrayal of Mustafa, the mentor who teaches Nuri all he knows about bees. Here is a character that is able to bring deft touches of humour to the play, lifting the otherwise harrowing subject matter.
The difficulties of pulling the setting about in time and place are solved by Ruby Pugh’s clever set, which has pieces of furniture growing out of what appear to be sand dunes in front of a gauze-covered skeletal rear wall. Video projections designed by Ravi Deepres transform both the stage and the background, and at one point a bed becomes the flimsy dinghy for a perilous sea crossing. In some ways the speed of scene transitions thus achieved is at times too rapid, and the resulting almost cinematic editing of the timeline can occasionally feel jarring.
Whilst perhaps it sweeps too quickly though events and in doing so passes some of the broader issues by, the play certainly succeeds in creating a central story that we can genuinely invest in, and there are some tremendously moving moments. When Nuri discovers his beehives destroyed by fire and their inhabitants left without home or community, the allegory for what will soon happen to the people of Aleppo could not be clearer. The matter of how the couple came to lose their son, too, is dealt with in an emotion which reduces much of the audience to tears.
It is a difficult job to translate a sweeping, epic written storyline into a successful piece of theatre, and although it occasionally trips itself up in its haste, this new play is both visually appealing and filled with excellent performances from a finely choreographed and deeply committed cast under the direction of Miranda Cromwell.
The Beekeeper of Aleppo, which premiered last month in Nottingham, is at Liverpool Playhouse to 11th March and then embarks on a major UK tour until 1st July, visiting a further 15 venues.
Star rating – 3½ stars
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| The cast of The Beekeeper of Aleppo - picture © Manuel Harlan |
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| Roxy Faridany, Alfred Clay and Joseph Long - picture © Manuel Harlan |
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