I started writing Mouth to try to answer an impossible question. What does it take to actually flee your own country?
I started thinking about writing a play about the Syrian refugee crisis last summer, when the world’s attention was gripped by those fleeing across the Mediterranean.
Writing about the crisis as a journalist was one thing. But I found myself returning to one particular question that couldn’t be answered through journalism alone: what would it mean to stand on the shore, facing the inky blackness of the Mediterranean, surrounded and jostled by strangers, gripping the hands of all the people you cared about most in the world, knowing that, in a matter of minutes or hours, the mouth of that wide, ceaseless sea might swallow you whole? What would it take to step into that danger with your eyes wide open?
I wanted to attempt to answer the question, but struggled to find the right dramatic scenario. It presented itself in a line from the poem Home, by the young British-Kenyan poet, Warsan Shire.
“You only run for the border/when you see the whole city running as well...the boy you went to school with/who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory/is holding a gun bigger than his body.”
I decided to write the story of that encounter.
Writing a short play really means slicing up a slightly longer one. Plays – particularly those for a festival such as Short+Sweet, which relies on dialogue more than props and scenery – require you to tell the story in as succinct a way as possible.
The best advice in this regard comes from Anton Chekhov, the Russian master of short stories: remove anything that diverts from the main story.
He expressed it rather more lyrically, in a letter to a Russian playwright: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on a wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.”
This concept, known as Chekhov’s gun, is a good litmus test for a writer, especially of short plays. If mentioning an off-screen character or place isn’t essential to the story, don’t do it.
Even then, writing the story is only the first challenge. Telling it on stage is a different skill. Theatre is deeply collaborative, and even with only four people involved – me, the director and two actors – there was a lot of back and forth.
Writing for the theatre means throwing your work into a crucible. By the time it reaches the stage, the rewrites and rehearsals have burnt away anything extraneous.
What remains, hopefully, can go some way towards answering some of the most difficult questions of all.
• Mouth will be staged at the New York University Abu Dhabi Black Box Theatre on Friday and Saturday as part of the Short+Sweet Festival
falyafai@thenational.ae
