Reviews for The Singing Stones by Kay Adshead

Reviews for The Singing Stones by Kay Adshead

Photo by Mia Hawk

Photo by Sarah Auber

Photo by Mia Hawk

Photo by Mia Hawk

Photo by Mia Hawk

 “Some parts are so moving I was left with an ache in my stomach, others made me laugh at loud. … It’s a magnificent, fantastical roar – against a world in which half the population is excluded, ignored, derided, and mistreated.

No-one in writer/director Kay Adshead’s line of fire is safe, neither the dictators who dye their hair soot black (“The minute they do, they should be frogmarched off and lynched in the public square. That simple pre-emptive action would save several genocides”), nor the niqab-wearing British women starting a new life with fundamentalist fighters (“So you are prepared to trade in all the small daily hates for one great big one?. Quite possibly the biggest hate of all”).

Adshead was a co-founder of Mama Quilla theatre company in 1999 the aim of which was to offer a female perspective on the big issues of the day. This does - though sadly the prospects for significant change in the position of Arab women appear to remain in an imagined future. Daniel Neilson … One World

“It’s a poetic narrative performed with spirit and energy by the entire ensemble and tells the story of a woman who is beaten by guards and imprisoned but releases her spirit through her beautiful singing voice….. Adshead achieves a unique poetic power…… performed with spirit and energy by the entire ensemble” … Daily Telegraph

…” a strong and heady picture of women making history ……  some great moments of political criticism the playwriting is sometimes suddenly able to soar free of the gruesome realities of political defeat and to scatter a bouquet of sharply wrought images across the hot studio space which is home to the show. At moments like this, when Adshead’s imagination takes flight, you feel — like one of the characters says — “sick of all the small daily hates” and part of something bigger, freer… Aleks Sierz.. Arts desk

“The script is infused with powerful imagery and mesmerising poetry, which leaves no question of the playwright’s artistic understanding of the play’s deeply political subject. Feminist issues are intrinsic to the play, but do not distract from the stories themselves. It seems that the author is challenging not only the inequality of power between men and women, but also the inequality between women in the Western and Arab worlds. The play doesn’t aggressively argue a political point, but instead lucidly shows us the plight of women and children in the Arab Spring, and in its penultimate scene conscientiously dissects the difficulties of respectfully communicating this bloody conflict on the stage.” … Felix online

 It is an invitation to listen, to witness, and to speak up”.,,, East End Review

“ One of the unique delights of the production is that all three plays make use of puppetry extremely effectively. For the middle play, a child-sized puppet represents a young girl named Ru’yah in each scene. Ru’yah has a real presence, even among the nine human actors on stage. She represents a little girl, who is forced to witness unbearable horrors. Her mother seeks to protect her, to shield her eyes and ears. But we are left with the impression that this young girl has already seen and experienced a level of trauma which she will never recover from and that little girls like Ru’yah are suffering from Tunisia to Libya, Egypt to Syria”. The Fword

Michael Batz is, Artistic Director of La Compagnie Yorick , Paris. He has collaborated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Isabelle Allende, George Tabori, and has worked as director for 30 years.

“I have always admired the steely poetry and the political passion in Ads head’s writing, and here it is marvellously strong   as usual, but there is something new as well : the wickedly acid humour in the  scene, where a group of  earnest feminists  meet in  Camberwell to try and  write a play about The Arab Revolutions was a revelation, utterly unexpected, and  disarming, truly great comedy. One could quite easily see a whole play developing from this departure, on this evidence Adshead is not just a great dramatic poet but a very funny comic writer.”

Sue Phelan is an ex journalist and a painter.

“The topicality of Ads head’s latest thought- provoker, The Singing Stones, is impressive. On the day the three schoolgirls go missing, off to join Isis, there they were, on stage sharing their disturbing but totally credible stories...Mama Quilla takes the lead once more, in producing cutting edge, politically relevant, theatre.

Adshead, with her large, talented cast, took a difficult subject and created a triad of plays about the women's role in the Arab Spring. The plays highlighted the volatile situation and just how pivotal women were in what was happening. Forget the stereotypical presentation of Arab women, Adshead shows them as feisty individuals, who can also be subversive.

The Singing Stones is a wonderful, theatrical experiment which refuses to let the role women played in the uprisings be ignored or derided “.

Ross Arnold is a young theatre practioner,

“The Singing Stones was a deeply insightful look into a world and situation that many of us, including myself, choose not to think about. Kay Adshead’s heart and soul is in this play which can especially be seen in Play Two: Scene 6: is meta-theatrical scene where a gathering of women discuss the creation of a play that has already been created that raises awareness of many the issues explored. Each character in that scene showed to me a different personality type of the director and the conflict between choices of right and wrong. The scene, which itself was rather comedic compared to the rest of the play, was a great lighter contrast to the gritty settings of the conflicted areas shown and yet is arguably the most important scene of the piece.” –

Megan Freeborn is young theatre practioner , who recently returned from Tanzania where she volunteered to work in a nursery for Children orphaned by AIDS .

The ‘Singing Stones’ was a marvellous must see piece of theatre. It was a beautifully poetic piece, which was well performed by the cast. Adshead confronts women’s issues in the middle-east that most playwrights would cower away from; it is informative and addresses the issues we face in different countries in the world. The triad of plays are gripping from start to finish that make you think about the society we live in today, and what women of different cultures have to face every day. I found it to be a very visual and powerful piece that will stay with me for a very long time

 Rob Allyson is a Stage Manager

“ With so much news coverage over the past few years of the Arab Spring and the different uprisings there was a day to day sense of being overwhelmed and saturated by the entirety of the unfolding events.

Attempting to distil the female perspective from the news and online material available and craft this into a watchable and engaging production would always be a challenge. However, the production, even managing to find humour within such dark subject matter,”

Singing Stones – the Women’s Spring, Review by Joshua Jacob

Singing Stones – the Women’s Spring

Joshua Jacob is riveted by a show that explores woman's place in the Middle East

The cast of The Singing Stones

Credit: Mia Hawk

The Singing Stones is a new play that explores the role of women in the Arab Spring. On the stage, as the audience are finding their seats, a young woman is sitting before a backdrop of rubble and broken furniture, on an otherwise bare stage. She is smiling contentedly whilst playing with some scraps of cloth, and needle and thread. How can I begin to understand this image in front of me, and the world it’s associated with: the world of Alia Alzougbi, of countless children, with countless mothers and fathers, a world of revolution and conflict. A distant land to which I am a voyeur, following it’s ebb and flow through international news. Kay Adshead – the writer and director of this first staging of the play – has found a way.

The play lucidly shows us the plight of women and children in the Arab Spring.

The audience’s apathy is undermined throughout the show. At the start of the play Alia Alzougbi, who reminds me of a lonely child, isolated but for the phantoms of her imagination, verbalises her disillusionment with her country’s ruling class through puppetry. She engages the audience with humour, but underlying her jokes there is a desperate young lady vying for our attention and trying to find a voice. The play offers anecdotes of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria, as well as Camberwell in South London. In every scene the women are railing against the denial of their freedom of speech and their incapacity to make change in the Arab world. The words of the characters on stage describe the brutality that the protesters were subjected to, the repugnant designs of dictators, the victimisation of children in war, and how the women in the Arab Spring dealt with these issues.

The script is infused with powerful imagery and enthralling poetry.

The acting was sometimes unconvincing, but otherwise fulfilled its function, and at points Alia Alzougbi was exceptional. The simplicity of the set worked well, as it didn’t distract the audience, while the size of the theatre allowed for an intimate viewing experience.

The script is infused with powerful imagery and mesmerising poetry, which leaves no question of the playwright’s artistic understanding of the play’s deeply political subject. Feminist issues are intrinsic to the play, but do not distract from the stories themselves. It seems that the author is challenging not only the inequality of power between men and women, but also the inequality between women in the Western and Arab worlds. The play doesn’t aggressively argue a political point, but instead lucidly shows us the plight of women and children in the Arab Spring, and in its penultimate scene conscientiously dissects the difficulties of respectfully communicating this bloody conflict on the stage. 

One World Review

Arab women's liberation - still more than a stone's throw away

'The Singing Stones' starts with a joke, told by puppets in a tribute to Masasit Mati – Spitting Image, Syria style – which mocks the Assad regime.

Daniel Nelson

The Singing Stones

 

Image by Arcola Theatre

The production also takes in a “court of redress” in Egypt where female protesters from Tahrir Square are “encouraged” to air their grievances; Tunisia, “At last our world is changing”, where a self-immolating hawker sparked the Arab Spring,; Libya, with women peering down a culvert at the cornered Gadaafi;  a semi-derelict building in Syria; a  border where female soldiers “fight to remain – unbelievably in 2015 – free women” ; and a Georgian house in Camberwell in which participants in a small gathering  discuss the idea of staging a presentation about women and the Arab Revolution.

It’s a big topic which the production doesn’t simply tackle: it assaults – with humour both bawdy and cutting, stories, puppets, brutal descriptions (one man in the audience on the night I attended sat with his head in his hands, apparently attempting to shut out the awfulness of the world), farce, and poetic flights of imagination.

Tone and pace veer wildly. Some parts are so moving I was left with an ache in my stomach, others made me laugh at loud. It runs for only about two hours, and occasionally flags, but overall it’s a magnificent, fantastical roar – against a world in which half the population is excluded, ignored, derided, mistreated.

No-one in writer/director Kay Adshead’s line of fire is safe, neither the dictators who dye their hair soot black (“The minute they do, they should be frogmarched off and lynched in the public square. That simple pre-emptive action would save several genocides”), nor the niqab-wearing British women starting a new life with fundamentalist fighters (“So you are prepared to trade in all the small daily hates for one great big one?... Quite possibly the biggest hate of all”).

Adshead was a co-founder of Mama Quilla theatre company in 1999 the aim of which was to offer a female perspective on the big issues of the day. This does - though sadly the prospects for significant change in the position of Arab women appear to remain in an imagined future.

http://oneworld.org/2015/02/08/arab-womens-liberation-still-more-than-a-stones-throw-away

THE SINGING STONES REVIEWS then ….

Photo By Mia Hawk

The Singing Stones by Kay Adshead 

Mamma Quilla at the Arcola Theatre, Saturday 28^th February 2015

The two veiled girls that meet on the border between two un-named Middle Eastern countries seem to have stepped straight out of familiar news reports of Tower Hamlets radicalisation and onto the Arcola stage, the girls debate with other hopeful, fleeing migrants about what awaits them on the other side of the border.  Adshead’s writing reveals the logic and the tragedy of such girls, ones who are fiercely intelligent yet naively trusting of their future influence over the Jihad they are joining and its fighters who they will be wedded to.  

The play The Singing Stones, which is presented as a series of three shorter plays, has many such female characters, who we recognise from reports of the Arab Spring and news of conflicts such as the Syrian war that are a consequence of that heady time in 2011. It is Adshead’s ability to stage current events sensitively and incisively that gives the piece its immediacy and power. The final hopeful play, in a magical realist style, tells of a singing woman, captured by the authorities in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and who, after silently undergoing a brutal period of torture and degradation, at the public inauguration of her captor’s election campaign gives birth to a girl, one of the next generation of Arab women, and at the same time (out of her mouth) to a flock of singing birds. This play, the final and most moving of the three, is written with Adshead’s hallmark poetic vision where the feminine voice has the potential to transcend the brutality and complications of politics.

Kay Adshead, as always, is concerned both with the immediate political situation overseas and how it impacts on imaginations at home.  This piece attempts to draw out the many and varied lives of people caught up in the conflicts over self determination, hopes for democracy and struggles with the East/West dichotomy that have come to a head in the Arab world. One incisive and ironic scene shows the meeting of a richly multicultural group in Camberwell who are making a misguided attempt to produce a play about the Arab Spring.  Here Western voyeurism and parasitism are exposed in a way that shows the play we are actually watching to be fully engaged in the politics of representation; the multicultural cast, at the same time as grappling with the difficulties of how to represent women’s actions from a distance, reflect our state of globalisation.  A state which is exposed as having brought about the conflicts in the Middle East where people strive for a Western style democracy whilst battling with systems that were enforced by Western colonial powers in the 20^th Century and earlier. 

The play is presented on an open stage strewn with the rubble and detritus of revolution and backed by a wall-collage of torn clothes onto which graffiti and satirical YouTube puppet shows are projected. Given a larger budget this could have been more successfully realised and design elements could have knitted together the wide range of characters and locations that are covered in the play.  Having said this, the puppet ‘girl’ which appears throughout and is a consistently haunting presence functions as a continuous thread and comes, by the end of the piece, to represent the hopes and fears for the next generation.  

The production was a thought provoking and timely piece on the contribution and experiences of women during the uprisings and the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Kay Adshead and her company Mamma Quilla respond to current events in a way that highlights the often forgotten and overlooked experiences of women, bringing much needed attention to the contribution made by women to era defining world events. 

BRIDIE MOORE

Writer, director , artistic director of PASSAGES theatre company …Public Reviews

The Singing Stones Reviews

What people have been saying about The Singing Stones 

It’s a poetic narrative performed with spirit and energy by the entire ensemble and tells the story of a woman who is beaten by guards and imprisoned but releases her spirit through her beautiful singing voice..... Adshead achieves a unique poetic power … Daily Telegraph

… a strong and heady picture of women making history ……  some great moments of political criticism the playwriting is suddenly able to soar free of the gruesome realities of political defeat and to scatter a bouquet of sharply wrought images across the hot studio space... Aleks Sierz, Arts desk

The Singing Stones is a powerful, thought provoking piece of theatre but much more importantly it is a timely challenge to us to hear the women’s stories behind all the news reports.  Across three very different pieces Kay Adshead forces us to listen to these silenced voices, engage with their pain and travel with them through hope to despair.  It is not an easy or comfortable experience and I left the theatre raw and emotionally wrung out but it is precisely our need to turn away from painful stories that Adshead addresses here.  The multi cultural cast take on a whole range of different roles, inhabiting each one with passion and commitment, to build up layers of narrative, counterpointed by the haunting singing of Najma Akhtar.  This is not a cosy evening of entertainment but it is timely and important and shows us why these voices must be heard. 
JENNY EASTOP director of MERCURIOUS

In Rehearsal for the Singing Stones

The Singing Stones At the Arcola