Winner of The Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2020, You Bury Me opens at the Lyceum Theatre tomorrow, March 7th. Its creator Ahlam prefers to remain anonymous, but has certainly caught the attention of the theatrical world.
A coming of age tale set in post-Arab Spring Cairo, the play follows the fates of six young Egyptians as they emerge from national trauma determined to live, and love freely. Ahlam was kind enough to answer a few questions from The QR as she and the crew prepare to open at the Lyceum, Edinburgh tomorrow!
Ahlam, what is it about Cairo that inspired the play’s creation?
Cairo is my home (my first home anyway), and all my life I’ve had a very complicated relationship with the city. It’s not an easy place to find yourself or find your feet in. There’s no personal space, there’s a lot of chaos, it’s hard to run simple errands, everyone is always at you, and as a young woman I found that very difficult to navigate, and I often felt alienated.
But in my later teens I fell in love with Cairo, and I loved how much the city had to give, how it had so much to discover, in its underground, in the quiet corners, it was a city that was full of life under quiet oppressive conditions, artists still make art even if it was dangerous or heavily censored, people still met and talked about the meaning of life and existence even though we were conditioned to never ask certain questions, people still had fun and discovered themselves and each other. Cairo can look very strict and conforming on the outside, but the reality is she’s all layers (as it says in the play several times).
I began to feel connected to the city after feeling very disconnected from it for most of adolescence, and when I moved away I felt even more connected, I didn’t realise how Cairene I was until I left. I started to really miss aspects about it that I hated, and that’s always a strange experience. So when I started writing, I knew that I was going to write about this place that I missed and loved so much, but that also caused (and still causes) me a lot of pain. And I wanted to write about its people who literally risked their lives to make their home a better, freer, more equal place and then were brutally punished for it.
Do you think a place makes people or people make places?
I think it’s definitely both. All the places I’ve lived in, or interacted with significantly, are part of who I am, they affect how I see the world, how I relate to others, how I interpret certain events. But I also think people make places. It’s a dialogue, it’s people responding to the environment and vice versa.
How do you bring Cairo into a theatre?
In the writing there’s a chorus character called “The City” and it’s a character played by all the actors on stage. The city is almost always present, it manipulates the space, it reveals stories and secrets, it narrates and argues with itself, it doesn’t mind its own business, at times it’s very playful and at times it can be ominous. That’s Cairo for me, and I hope the play captures some of it. Also the staging, set, music, sound and lights really support that.
What would you say are the ambitions of the play?
My biggest ambition is that this play honours my peers, that it honours those that fought for Egypt’s future and were punished for it. At the moment I am terrified of erasure, although a lot of material is out there about the Arab Spring and the Egyptian revolution, it feels like we’re losing the narrative. Some people are growing up without really knowing what happened in 2011 and what happened in the years that followed.
I want to make sure that people know that in 2015 as young people tried to live their lives as normal, they were being disappeared, incarcerated, banished by a new military regime that is still in power now.
When I write plays I always try to imagine someone picking up the text in two hundred years and reading it, what do I want to communicate about this moment? How can I tell this story so that they understand what this feeling is like right now? I want this imaginary person in two hundred years to gain a deeper sense of what our world is like now, what we went through, what we survived, what we were worried about. So in a sense this is also my way of documenting some of the violence inflicted on young Egyptians in this particular time, as a small act of resistance, as claiming and holding on to our narrative so that it’s not forgotten or erased.
Has the play surprised any of you in any way since coming into existence?
The first thing is it’s very funny and the actors have so much fun with it, which is exactly what I wanted but you never know it’ll read that way when you’ve been alone with it for such a long time.
And the second surprising thing is that it feels very youthful, more youthful than I expected. I feel like I’ve written a play that I would have loved to see as a sixteen year old, it would have changed my life to see something like this on an Egyptian stage, and I know this isn’t an Egyptian stage and we’re not in the same context at all as when I was a teenager but it still makes me proud to have written this for my younger self. I think she deserves it.
You Bury Me is a co-production of Orange Tree Theatre, Paines Plough, The Women’s Prize for Playwriting, 45North and The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh, in association with Bristol Old Vic.
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