Edinburgh Fringe 2026
Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country?
The Trojan Women Project
Genre: Autobiography, New Writing, Solo Show
Venue: Gilded Balloon (Teviot)
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
In Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country?, Palestinian Syrian actor Arwa Omaren combines Euripides’ ‘The Trojan Women’ with her own story of displacement in a solo performance that weaves the words of Euripides’ Hecuba, Queen of Troy, into her own story of a perilous journey from Syria to the UK.
Review
Review
A compelling personal account of fleeing persecution and the refugee experience through a journey from childhood in a refugee camp in Syria to telling her own story on a stage in Edinburgh.
The show opens on what’s known as death mountain, Arwa Omeren at the mercy of people smugglers, with no way of knowing whether she’ll make it to Europe, to London, or die there on the mountainside. On a small stage, with nothing more than a suitcase, a few items of clothing and a scarf, she recreates every land and space she has lived in – we wince at the sheer drop of the path before her at the mountain’s edge, laugh with her as she dances in Lebanon, hold our breath as she hides from Turkish border guards, and feel real delight when, finally settled in the UK, she is reunited with her dog, Jacko.
Co-written and directed by William Stirling, and produced by the Trojan Women Project, Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? fuses classical text with contemporary testimony to striking effect. Stirling brings
Her story is powerful, told entirely from the heart, and her range as a performer is phenomenal – physicality, voice, accents, all deployed in service of the story rather than for show. She wrote the first draft over two days, pouring her experience onto the page, and that urgency, that passion, is felt in every line. Woven through her own story is Hecuba, the fallen Queen of Troy, whom Omeren also performs, bringing to the role both her classical training and lived experience.
Along the way she introduces us to countless people she met on her journey, each brought vividly to life in her hands.
A Palestinian Syrian who fled the Syrian war, Omeren trained as an actor in Damascus, and was developing a successful career (including work for BBC Radio 4) before finding herself on the move again. She made her way to London, where new challenges awaited: navigating the asylum system, and the particular horror of homelessness, sleeping on the streets of a country she’d hoped would offer safety. She recounts many difficult moments but there is also warmth, humour in her accounts of those she met on the journey and ultimately she has settled in the UK and become involved with the Scottish-founded Trojan Women Project.
In the midst of so much news coverage of Palestine, the Middle East and displaced people, it’s easy to lose sight of the millions of individuals caught up in it. Every one of them has a story, and Omeren tells hers with consummate skill, at a time when conversations around migration and identity feel more polarised than ever.
There is much to enjoy here in a story of real triumph over hardship, but it also offers a vivid, visceral sense of what it means to be stateless – to leave somewhere at a moment’s notice, to return and find home reduced to rubble, and, for many of us, just how vulnerable a woman travelling alone is at the mercy of the smugglers.
A story that is both deeply personal and universal, beautifully crafted and performed by a consummate actor.
