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Helping Refugees Help Themselves: The Play Really is the Thing!
Filmmakers Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling explore how theater heals and transforms.
Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” when the troubled Prince stages a play to catch a murderer. The underlying point of the play-in-the-play is that drama is an incredibly powerful force for storytelling and much else.
Fast forward to the 21st century for an amazing example of that Shakespearean wisdom. Two incredibly creative British filmmakers created something called The Trojan Women Project to use drama to help refugees from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine cope with their trauma. The idea is elegant in its simplicity: combine the wisdom and words of Euripides’ play with the tragic lived experiences of people fleeing war and destruction, as therapy for them and as a learning tool for audiences who are offered unique insight into what war is really like.
Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling have worked on this project for more than a decade. The Tällberg Foundation first met them in 2014 when they brought a dozen Syrian refugee cast members to one of our workshops. We witnessed an absolutely amazing performance of The Trojan Women laden with a depth of tragedy that even the greatest actors would be challenged to produce—because for the Syrians, it was their lives, not their lines they were sharing.
Listen as Charlotte and William describe how they tap into the real power of the play, and how it can transform refugees as well as audiences.
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By Tällberg Foundation
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Filmmakers Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling explore how theater heals and transforms.
Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” when the troubled Prince stages a play to catch a murderer. The underlying point of the play-in-the-play is that drama is an incredibly powerful force for storytelling and much else.
Fast forward to the 21st century for an amazing example of that Shakespearean wisdom. Two incredibly creative British filmmakers created something called The Trojan Women Project to use drama to help refugees from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine cope with their trauma. The idea is elegant in its simplicity: combine the wisdom and words of Euripides’ play with the tragic lived experiences of people fleeing war and destruction, as therapy for them and as a learning tool for audiences who are offered unique insight into what war is really like.
Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling have worked on this project for more than a decade. The Tällberg Foundation first met them in 2014 when they brought a dozen Syrian refugee cast members to one of our workshops. We witnessed an absolutely amazing performance of The Trojan Women laden with a depth of tragedy that even the greatest actors would be challenged to produce—because for the Syrians, it was their lives, not their lines they were sharing.
Listen as Charlotte and William describe how they tap into the real power of the play, and how it can transform refugees as well as audiences.
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