Ahlam, the joint winner of the inaugural Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2020, talks about their play You Bury Me which tours the UK from 24th February until 22nd April 2023.
Ahlam’s You Bury Me is a play about sex, friendship and coming of age in post-Arab Spring Cairo and was joint winner of the inaugural Women’s Prize for Playwriting 2020, an award established by Ellie Keel Productions and Paines Plough.
Directed by Paines Plough’s Joint Artistic Director Katie Posner, the production will open at Bristol Old Vic from 24th Feb to 4th March before moving on to The Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh from 7th to 18th March and running at the Orange Tree Theatre from 27th March to 22nd April, marking the first show in Tom Littler’s first season as Artistic Director at the OT.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
You Bury Me will tour from February, what can you tell us about this new play?
Well, I guess the first thing would be that it’s not a new play to me! I wrote the first draft back in 2015 which is when the play is set. When I first wrote it, it was a contemporary piece but now it’s slightly more historical.
You Bury Me is about a group of young people in Egypt who are doing typical young people things: they’re falling in love, discovering and exploring their desires, their faith (or lack thereof) and their relationships, but the context in which it’s happening is more dangerous due to the establishment of a new military regime in 2014, but also due to their experience of an extraordinary historical moment, which is the revolution that took place in 2011. So essentially, it’s a play that combines a coming-of-age story(ies) with grief over a national trauma that has only just begun.
And what inspired you to write about the fallout from the Egyptian uprisings in 2015?
Originally I wanted to write a slightly absurd Romeo & Juliet-type love story set in a police state. I was in my mid 20s and I wanted to write about being young in Egypt, I wanted to write a piece that teenage me would have loved to see.
But as I was writing the story in 2015, Egypt was suffering waves of forced disappearances. People (a lot of them young) were being taken by the state authorities who wouldn’t inform their families or loved ones of where they were, at least initially.
A lot of them were subsequently imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed or executed. It was a very dark and distressing time, and it was this new military regime establishing itself in a very violent way, and they made sure to punish anyone who thought it was OK to oppose or question their government.
I felt like I couldn’t write about Egypt without writing about that, that it was dishonest in some way – dishonest to myself, as well, because even though I wasn’t living there anymore, it deeply affected me and I clearly wanted to process what was happening in Egypt at the time.
This is actually who I am as a writer, I cannot write a play that is separate from the politics of their world or separate from my politics. That’s what the revolution did to me, I wouldn’t be the writer I am today if it weren’t for the revolution.
How did you go about capturing the beauty of Cairo for the stage?
I tried my best! The whole play is really a love letter to Cairo. It’s about my deep and complex feelings about the place (and to an extent about leaving it). It’s also a love letter to its people, to all the people that fought in Tahrir particularly. For me writing this play has become about honouring them, what they lived through and what they fought for.
I think watching the characters struggle with how to live and love and fight for a place that is crushing them captures how painful that relationship can be but also how utterly beautiful it is as well. It’s a tragic love story in some ways, but it’s also warm and funny and paradoxical; just like Cairo, and just like the revolution.
Why do you think there aren’t more stories like this being told on stage?
That’s a difficult question for me to answer because I don’t know. These types of stories are told in MENA/SWANA regions all the time – even with all the censorship – but not so much in the UK. Maybe one reason is that the theatre establishment here seems to think that a British audience will only want to see stories that involve Britain in some way or another, and this story has nothing to do with Britain.
There is a general resistance to ‘stories from other places’ unless they are in specific contexts, such as an Arab arts festivals or a night of theatre in translation, there is much less theatre in translation here than in other European countries (and in some ways I count You Bury Me as theatre in translation), which is a shame really. I think theatres sometimes underestimate what British audiences want to see and who constitutes a “British audience”.
The upside is I do see the industry progressing in the right direction generally. Of course there’s still a long way to go, but I’ve seen a significant difference between now and ten years ago, so I would like to acknowledge that as well.
You were joint winner of the Women’s Prize for Playwriting, what opportunities has that given you as a writer?
The best opportunity it’s given me has been working with Katie Posner and Paines Plough. We’ve been working on You Bury Me since I won the prize, and it’s been a very nurturing experience. Katie has really pushed me (as in, she really challenged me) to figure out what this play means now in 2023, and I’ve genuinely surprised myself as a writer. I sometimes read over certain scenes and think wow I’ve done that, or I’ve written that which is such a special feeling. I had essentially stopped writing completely between 2017 – 2019, at the time my self-confidence plummeted, and I was pretty lost for a while if I’m totally honest.
Winning this prize is one of the things that has helped me slowly gain back my confidence. I feel I have found myself again and I’ve learned so much about who I am as a writer, about my voice and my creative process, and about how I want to shape my practice moving forward. I don’t really have the words to express what that means to me.
What would you say to anyone thinking of booking to see You Bury Me?
The show is about many things, it’s about youth, it’s about revolution, it’s about state violence and it’s about love. There is a lot of dark and a lot of light, because where I’m from that’s just how life is, it’s not one or the other.
It’s a show that is energetic, and funny, and warm, and silly, and dead serious. It’s full of heart and full of complex feelings. I love writing plays where audiences laugh and cry and gasp out loud, plays that give people a range of topics to chat through afterwards, and plays that offer audiences the chance to process emotions together so that we don’t have to do it alone. That’s what I love about theatre, so I hope You Bury Me does just that.
