Brighton Year-Round 2024

Let it Be a Tale

ThirdSpace

Genre: Community Theatre, Dance and Movement Theatre, Devised, Family, Fringe Theatre, Magical Realism, Physical Theatre, Storytelling, Theatre, World Theatre

Venue: Brighton Dome Studio

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

‘Let it Be a Tale’ is structured around the ongoing horror of Gaza, but it’s filled with tales told by displaced or oppressed people from many cultures.  Angela El-Zeind’s set evokes a school building that’s suffered an airstrike, with a shattered concrete beam hanging precariously over the acting space, and where rescuers are desperately digging for survivors. 

They hear a voice from under the rubble – “Can you tell someone I’m here “    

There’s a young girl (Veronika Holenko) who’s trapped, and to calm herself while she waits to be rescued she conjures up Scheherazade, the story-telling princess from the Middle Eastern collection of tales we know as ‘The One Thousand and One Nights’.     Marija Kirstukaite as the princess stood at the side of the stage, bathed in a soft green light, as she introduced the tales, one by one.

Tales from China, from the Congo, from Libya.

From Palestine, from the Rohingya: Myanmar refugees living in Bangladesh.

From Haiti, from Yemen, Sudan, and Iraq

Even from as far afield as Ukraine and New Zealand.

So many – sadly this review doesn’t have the space to recount them all.

Tales that are told by people who’ve become refugees, who’ve had to abandon their homeland through war or colonisation.  People who’ve lost their villages, but who’ve held on to their culture, who still keep the old stories alive – the stories they heard as children.

They may be trapped; but as Scheherazade tells the young girl – “In the world of stories, you are already free”

The stories themselves are wonderful, like the fairy tales we all grew up with.  Although most of us are more familiar with Hans Anderson, the Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault,  the same characters and events are found in stories from most countries.  Kings and beggars, wise men and fools, sorcerers and magic objects or animals.

A perfect example is ‘The Ghawal’, a tale from Libya.  The Ghawal is a terrifying creature, who keeps its treasure locked up in a castle.   A greedy woman makes her husband steal the riches, though to do so he must climb a great tree to get into the castle, then obey a strict set of rules: not eating from tables laden with delicious food, not gazing into a mirror, etcetera.   The man succeeds, but then his cousin tries to do the same, but without being equally cautious, and he is killed by the Ghawal.   

There are many parallels with ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’; and it’s the same with most of the other tales.  The themes seem to be universal.  But when we remember that the real purpose of fairy stories is to caution young children against deception, and reassure them that ultimately the good people prevail over the bad ones – then we can see that people are actually very much the same, the world over.

So how did ThirdSpace act out these tales?   There were twenty-four of them in total, most of them huddled in the wrecked school at the start, and they came out en masse to become the stories’ characters.   All of them were clad in loose pyjamas or shifts, pale grey and stained, as if they had just pulled themselves clear of the rubble and dust. 

The cast are youngsters, not seasoned actors, yet they produced powerful, confident movements and gestures, as they filled the stage.   Sometimes they swept  right across the space as they became a crowd, or a wedding party.   Very clear diction, too – completely audible to this reviewer sitting six rows back, with almost none of the rushing of lines that sometimes plagues less experienced actors.    And they aren’t short of talent – the narratives for the tales were spoken by a whole series of actors.

And I mustn’t forget to mention the musical accompaniment – perfectly matched pieces by Best Foot Music, filling the Studio space with notes from guitar, oud, flute and percussion, as well as haunting vocals.

Everyone: directors and cast, have obviously worked incredibly hard for months to produce the stunningly choreographed movements that we saw on stage.   They are adept at physical theatre, too – for ‘The Ghawal’, several of the actors climbed onto a platform to become the monster’s castle, while others acted out the tale’s characters.  Still others became trees in the forest, arms raised like branches and bodies swaying in the wind.  

Another example illustrates this.  (See – I’ll try to squeeze in as many tales as I can …) 

 In ‘A Rhinoceros and a Rabbit’, a Rohingya tale originally from Myanmar, a rhinoceros offers to ‘protect’ the smaller forest animals from harm.  But – he demands to be rewarded by being given one of the animals to eat, every day, as a fee …

Sound familiar?

Eventually a rabbit – the smallest and weakest animal in the forest – manages to trick the big beast and drown him in a well, by convincing him to leap in.   The cast not only acted out the animals and the trees, at the end they sat in a big circle, feet facing inward and touching, and became the rim of the well itself.  David Goodman’s sound design gave us the heavy splash as the rhinoceros tumbled in.  

Brilliant!    And the fact that it was the tiny rabbit who managed to defeat the big bully made me think of Greta Thunberg’s book – ‘No One Is Too Small To Make A Difference’

There were images projected onto the rear of the stage – as well as each tale’s title and country of origin, Giles Thacker’s video featured lots of kites, red like the little girl’s dress, flying free in the sky above the wrecked school.

The kites, along with the production’s title, are inspired by ‘If I must die’, a poem written by Refaat Alareer, a Palestinian professor who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in 2023, along with six of his family.

If I must die, 

you must live 

to tell my story 

to sell my things 

to buy a piece of cloth 

and some strings, 

(make it white with a long tail) 

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza 

while looking heaven in the eye 

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze— 

and bid no one farewell 

not even to his flesh 

not even to himself— 

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above 

and thinks for a moment an angel is there 

bringing back love 

If I must die 

let it bring hope 

let it be a tale

Published December 22, 2024December 22, 2024 by Strat Mastoris