Birds Without Wings: The Guardian

Louis de Bernieres’ book, and therefore, too, this adaptation of it, is massive and deals with huge issues.  Ethnic cleansing, population exchange, racial and religious atrocity and the effect of it all on the poor humans (birds without wings) who suffer in its wake.

This is Asia Minor in meltdown around the time of the First World War.  In a hillside village, Turks, Greeks and Armenians, Muslims and Christians, and people speaking various languages had been rubbing along more or less satisfactorily for years. 

Then the overwhelming tide of international events overtakes them in the form of the First World War, the Balkans Wars and the Graeco-Turkish War. Nationalist ambitions and international power shifts have their effect and lead to racial and religious antagonisms.  The community is destroyed and turned into a ghost village.

It’s all very different from what some might regard as Eastern Angles usual fare, though themes of cultural evolution or decline have recurred in past productions. It’s performed by a multi-ethnic cast playing a range of rural characters - village parents and children, a potter, a Greek schoolteacher, an Imam and an Orthodox priest who muddle along together by saying they can’t both be wrong. No one character dominates. The play shows how the whole fabric of a simple society is destroyed by interference from outside. 

It’s performed on Becky Hurst’s ingenious set which keeps the image of the hillside coastal village before us throughout. Ivan Cutting who directs, soon gets us to feel we are with a company rather than a set of disparate actors, even though some of cast are speaking in second language.  

The backcloth is of intrusive violence, military occupation,  a massacre, the stoning of a wife, madness, and a whirl of destruction into which even the fearful villagers are drawn.  

There’s an initial unfamiliarity with exactly where and when in history one is, but this soon fades away with the recognition of the relevance of the issues.  Iraq was a post  First World War international fit–up, the consequences of which are still with us.  What happened in Kosovo came as a result of the crumbling of Yugoslavia, another external construction.  The veil debate, which erupted even while this production was in rehearsal, too, emerges briefly as a theme.

 Foreign interference is invariably done for self-interest.  It’s the people on the ground who suffer. This plays makes us think on.