Doing A Geographical

Our playwrights are being sent to locate ‘authentic voices’ abroad — but are they finding what British theatre imagines to be there? By David Greig

In the language of Alcoholics Anonymous there is a redolent phrase for that phenomenon where the alcoholic says that he would be able to stop drinking if he could only move to California where everything would be better. They call it ‘doing a geographical’. The phrase captures the futility of thinking that a change in exterior geography will in any way address the interior conflicts which are causing the subject to drink. It’s not a phenomenon confined to alcoholics. The entire holiday industry is based on selling people the same premise. This phrase came to my mind recently when, on a trip to the Middle East to lead a drama workshop, I found myself in the souk in Aleppo looking for some traces of the terrorist Mohammed Atta.

The trip had begun with thoughts of a different kind of terrorism. I am a child of the 70s so I couldn’t help but feel a little thrilled when my plane landed, however briefly, on the tarmac of Beirut International Airport. I peered out of the cabin at the lights of the city at night. ‘Beirut’ is still such an evocative name to my generation and it felt odd to be physically within its space. Momentarily I had the idea of myself not in an real aeroplane but in some sort of simulator, an exhibit in a future Middle Eastern heritage centre. ‘Experience for yourself what it might be like to have been hijacked by the PLO.Wait to see if your pilot will get permission to refuel. Hold your breath as the pretty stewardess calms down the sweating gunman.’ In the seventies, of course, flying, like terrorism was still a vaguely glamorous activity.

The terrorists of the seventies were leftists calling for world revolution. They wore mirrored sunglasses. They had names like Carlos The Jackal and The Baader Meinhof Gang. Some were even women. The hijacked plane was a platform from which to spread their dangerous political message of desperation. A terrorist in the seventies only shot passengers when something went wrong, when the authorities let a deadline pass. Death was not the point of the mission but a necessary and expected by-product of its staging. And when death came, the crumpled body of the victim would be thrown out onto the tarmac in a resonant gesture of collective failure. Nowadays we live in altogether uglier times.

I was stopping in Beirut on the way back from Syria where I had been running some playwriting workshops with young Syrian students at the academy of dramatic arts. It is part of the business of the contemporary British playwright to travel about the world on behalf of the British Council doing workshops. For the playwright it is an interesting way to travel and for the British Council it’s a way to parlay the good name of British theatre into small amounts of desperately needed political capital in those many parts of the world where our name is mud, or worse.

The theatrical purpose of these workshops is to spread the techniques of British New Writing theatre – in particular the methods of the Royal Court Theatre in London. Simplistically, this involves gathering groups of young people who may not have any experience of theatre or writing and working with them, through a series of exercises and demonstrations, to develop plays which reflect — in a naturalistic way — the experiences of their lives. I have conducted such workshops in Spain, Bulgaria and Palestine. I have been invited to do so in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria. Colleagues of mine have conducted such workshops in places as far afield as Kazakhstan and Uganda.

The point of these workshops is emphatically not to engage with and learn from the local theatre culture. In some countries, like Kazakhstan or Nigeria local theatre culture is amateur and underdeveloped and in other countries like Cuba and Argentina a thriving theatre culture has created a knowledge of and an explicit desire to learn from British New Writing. The point is to create Cuban, Ugandan and Khazakstani plays which resemble in form the new British plays which occupy the upstairs of the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre.

I think these workshops represent British Theatre’s attempt at a response to a complicated situation. Globalisation means that the biggest issues of the day are being played out in places like Shanghai, Darfur and Baghdad and British audiences want to see these stories represented on stage. On the other hand our profound awareness of multicultural values mean that British writers feel uneasy representing such places directly. There are too many echoes of imperialism or ‘the white man’s burden’ in western writers telling other people’s stories for them. Out of this tension comes the imperative to, if you like, train the subjects of globalisation in the methods of telling their own particular local stories.

The particular and the local carry a high value in British theatre because they are associated with authenticity. Plays set in the West of Ireland, plays set in Newcastle, plays set in West Fife appeal to audiences in London partly because they appear to carry the weight of ‘authentic’ experience rather than the decadent and insipid experience of the metropolis which, in theatre terms, primarily exists in order to be satirised. The drive to find voices from the third world is just a natural extension of this desire for authenticity.

I went for a walk through the old town of Allepo to the Citadel. The Souk was closed because everyone was attending Friday prayers. I was curious to see the Souk because of the role it played in the shaping the consciousness of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11th hijackers. Atta, a young Egyptian, studied Geography and Town Planning at University in Hamburg. His thesis was on the Souk in Allepo which the Syrian Government was tearing down to replace with a more modern, concrete souk. Atta’s thesis was that the old souk represented a better and oppositional model of city planning than the supermarkets and suburbs of America and Europe. Atta wrote lovingly of the Arab Souk with its narrow streets, its organic accretions over time, its organisation into streets of silversmiths, streets of butchers and streets of spice dealers and so on. Where the Western supermarket attempts at all points to erase the friction of human contact from any transaction in order to increase efficiency, the Souk, with its emphasis on haggling and personal contact between customer and trader does the opposite – it deliberately increases the overall amount of face to face human contact one must experience in order to achieve one’s daily tasks. The more I think about the young Atta’s approach to town planning the more I find that my own arguments against supermarkets built in the West Fife and the destruction of Dunfermline town centre echo his thesis. I’m not sure how I feel about this.

With everyone away at prayer the new souk was simply a series of long strip lit tunnels lined with shuttered shops. Narrow streets led off from the main tunnels into the residential parts of the old town. Here, the blank outer walls of the house, the jumbled cubist yellow shapes, manage to give one a sense of both claustrophobia and safety at the same time. Like being enfolded in the bosom of an aunt.

I emerged from the souk into the sunlight at the foot of the Aleppo Citadel. As I approached the gate I was picked up by Zacharias, a handsome man in his early thirties with a thick moustache and a soft brown scarf wrapped round his neck. He took me by the arm and led me into the citadel practicing his English with small talk. What was my name, where was I from. I wondered what he wanted. I thought perhaps he was about to offer his services as a guide which would have been a little annoying because I had been looking forward to wandering around on my own. In the event he cracked pretty quickly and got to the point. Did I know any girls? Did I bring any Scottish Girls with me to Aleppo? I said I knew girls but none here in Aleppo and no, I had not brought any Scottish girls with me. He sniffed, disappointed and we continued on.We walked up through the archaeological rubble and stonework and into the citadel. Zacharias told me he spends the summer hanging around the cities, parks and landmarks looking for European girls to chat up. He said ‘I like to change my life a little. Only a little. A little. But I like to change it. I like to break my life. To break it up.’ I wasn’t sure if he meant that he liked to break the monotony of his life by encountering girls or if he meant he wanted a girl to break his life apart.

We stood at the northern rampart of the citadel. It was cool even in the sunlight. I felt quite tired. I didn’t say much. The call to prayer rose up suddenly from the minarets all over the city. ‘Allahu Akhbar’, ‘God is great’. Each of the hundreds of calls echoing, out of synch with each other so that the effect was as if the city had struck an enormous ringing Debussy chord. Zacharias took my arm again.

‘I want to write a film script’, he said. ‘Perhaps if I wrote the story, the true story of my life, also containing mythology, you could write it for a movie. How much can I earn for a movie?’ I told him he could expect maybe 2000 dollars for an en spec first draft from an unknown Syrian writer. I didn’t really know the market in Syria. Perhaps there were Arab television stations which might take his script, if he were to write it. He seemed disappointed again. He said two thousand dollars wasn’t enough to change his life. I said that if he was able to sell the script to Hollywood he could expect a lot more.

Zacharia stared out over the city’s northern suburbs stretching out towards hazy mountains on the far horizon. ‘Too many mosques.’ he said. ‘Girls here are not free’ He told me.
Not like the British girls. He said he had seen English girls coming out of the sea naked. I said that was unusual in my experience. He said he’d seen it with his own eyes. English girls and men together naked in the sea.

Two American girls were wandering around in the citadel. I could tell that Zacharias, spotting them, sensed an opportunity to change his life. He suggested we make love to them, a little, maybe for two or three days. I said if that is what he wanted he ought to go and talk to the girls. He wanted me to come with him to make up the foursome. Had I felt there was even a remotely plausible prospect of success in this venture I might have been bolder but as I was cold now, and tired and bored, I told him I was married and besides, the girls didn’t seem interested in us.

He gave up on the Americans for the time being and as we walked on round the castle walls he told me about his French girlfriend who was, he said, called ‘Fanny’. He was going to visit her in France next year, in Lyon. His dark eyes betrayed no pleasure at the thought of this. Perhaps he didn’t really believe it would happen.

I asked him about his job. He told me he worked making furniture from wood and metal. He was one of five brothers. The other brothers were all married with children. Later that afternoon, after the mosque, they would all gather at his father’s house and eat. ‘Busy’ I said. “Busy’ he replied without much inflection. I thought of him, walking home through the narrow streets,
returning from another unsuccessful trawl, and sitting down to spend another long Friday afternoon amongst his four brothers and their wives and their children and his mother and father and no doubt other relatives. I thought that I too would find that a very dispiriting prospect. Perhaps I too would try to find girls who might break up my life.

I noticed that Zacharias had guided me back to the place where the two Americans were looking at statuary. Was I sure I didn’t want an American girl? I protested again that I was married. He didn’t feel that was a problem. ‘A person shouldn’t eat the same food every day,’ he said. The girls sensed on his approach that Zacharias was something of a heat-seeking missile and they headed off silently, heads down as soon as they saw him. I realised that because of Zacharias I had not consulted my guidebook and I had no idea what any of the ruins in the citadel were, what their significance might be and from when they might be dated.

All I could discern was a jumble of creamy yellow stone. In the middle of the walls there was what I was pretty sure was an amphitheatre. Aleppo has a serious claim to being the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. I wondered if the theatre was from the Roman period. Perhaps staging travelling productions of Plautus and Seneca. I took the chance to look it up in my rough guide but it turned out to be a modern structure, an interloper, with what the rough guide called ‘no historical right’ to be there.

Zacharias came back and we wandered on aimlessly, arm in arm among what the rough guide, I now knew, called ‘a weed infested jumble of half excavated ruins worth little more than a casual glance’.

‘I was in love with a girl for a long time.’ He announced. ‘but it didn’t work out.’ I asked if she had broken his heart. ‘Yes’, he said. He said he could make love to a European girl for two or three days but it would be love of the body, not love of the heart. I said maybe, one day, he would find love again. He responded sadly. No, it wasn’t likely. He needed change. He needed to shake things up a little. He needed to go to Europe maybe. Maybe go to Lyon. Maybe find Fanny. I noticed we were, again, next to the American girls.

‘Zacharias’ I said, ‘you want to speak to these girls and I want to find a café and sit and write. Why don’t we say goodbye? He assented with what seemed like relief. I wondered if I had begun to cramp his style. He smiled at me. ‘You know, Mr David,’ he said, ‘I am dead inside.’ I thought I might have misheard him. ‘I am dead inside. Every day is the same. I don’t see any hope. What do you think I should do?’ I said that I felt that was a very difficult question. ‘Maybe you should sit down and write that film script you were talking about,’ I suggested. He didn’t seem convinced.

He looked over to the American girls. I looked at him. I saw again that he was a handsome man. ‘I like to be physically strong’ he said, ‘and mentally strong.’ He had those dark lugubrious eyes. Perhaps if he was lucky the American girls would take him back to their hotel and share him between them for a couple of days, ‘just to make a little change in his life, not to break it.’ Perhaps if he chose a tourist attraction less ill spoken of by the rough guide, somewhere with a little more opportunity, he might be successful in befriending a foreign girl at some point in the course of some long summer. God knows, after his last remark I would have slept with Zacharias if I had thought it would cheer him up. But I’m fairly sure the American girls gave him the brush-off. Zacharias was too old for this game. He didn’t have the sort of cocky, boisterous innocence which can, I suspect, prove winning if a woman is on holiday and looking for adventure. Zacharias is a man and he seemed to carry with him a heavy air of defeat.

Mohammed Atta spent a year in Aleppo researching his thesis. While he was there it is believed he was in love with a girl but unable to marry her because he did not have a job. The theory among many writers on September 11th is that Atta only began attending the radical mosque in Hamburg on his return from Alleppo as a reaction to his disappointment in love.

I ran the workshop in Syria with 20 young writers from Damascus. From this process came 12 full-length first draft plays. I will return to Syria in December to work with those writers, developing their work further and, in spring next year at the Royal Court, there will be a series of readings of perhaps four or five plays by young Syrian writers. I would have liked Zacharias to have been able to attend my workshop. I would like to read Zacharias’ film script although I doubt I ever shall.

Mohammed Atta gave the various targets of the September 11th attacks codenames based on university departments. The World Trade Centre tower into which his plane flew he codenamed ‘The Department of Town Planning’ and there is perhaps a distant sense in which, by choosing to attack the World Trade Centre he was avenging himself for the destruction of Alleppo’s old souk. But I wonder if Mohammed Atta wasn’t, like Zacharias looking for Fanny in Lyon, like British Theatre sending authors to look for authentic voices in the third world, simply guilty of mistaking physical space for metaphysical reality and ‘doing a geographical’.

David Greig is a playwright.
His plays include Caledonia Dreaming,
Outlying Islands and 8000m