13 – 17 June

Christy Lefteri’s 2019 bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo has been adapted for the stage by Olivier Award winning Miranda Cromwell and is currently on a national tour.  The audience follows beekeeper Nuri (Alfred Clay) and his wife Afra’s (Daphne Kouma) journey from Syria to England, in part re-told through Nuri’s eyes after his arrival, and then switching out later.

Unfortunately this harrowing, fascinating narrative is hampered by both dialogue and staging and leaves you strangely cold. Somehow there is an awkward dullness in this story of the inspiring resilience and tenacity of Syrian refugees in the face of the horrors of war, disaster, subjugation, systemic racism and more. The set is simple and beautifully used, the supporting cast (particularly Joseph Long) do well with many characters,

The second half was much stronger than the first. This may be because there was less temporal jumping-around (or at least, it was more deftly signalled), or because a plot twist served to illuminate a character’s interior life in a very real way on stage, both of which were problems before the interval.

As the play plumbs the tragedies of the characters’ situations more, you’d be hard pressed not to care. But when plot becomes the primary or even sole catalyst for our empathy in theatre, there is a disconnection (or disconnections) in the relationship between those presenting and those watching the play. The stiffness of this production disallows great feeling. Only actual footage of war torn Syria makes you hold your breath.

Arguably the script works against the cast, and fosters a feeling of detachment between characters and audience early on; it is heavy-handed in its messaging, and feels ‘writerly’ or novelistic. Given the source material, this may be unsurprising. But page-to-stage adaptations can be incredible. Here – and I have not read the book, so this is conjecture – I sense perhaps they tried to stick too close to the source material, but without the nuance of all those chapters, the feeling you’re left with is that they are
trying to do too much with not enough.

★★☆☆☆   Will Amott   14 June 2023

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan