Oh My Sweet Land: cooking up a Syrian storm

 By Daniel Nelson

Corinne Jaber

Image by Photo by David Sandison

How to convey on stage the cataclysm in Syria “when the horror is so big you can’t talk about it”?

You write a love story about a woman cooking, explains German-Syrian actor Corinne Jaber.

She is cooking for an hour in Oh My Sweet Land, which runs at the Young Vic from 9 April until 3 May.

But the play is no Great British Bake Off and it’s not “entertainment” in the conventional light-hearted sense, says Jaber.

“It’s not for children,” she emphasises. And the Young Vic’s promotional one-liner describes it as “an urgent new play exploring the crisis in Syria through the true stories of refugees.”

In researching the play, Jaber and author and director Amir Nizar Zuabi talked to refugees in Jordan and Lebanon.

“I wanted to meet people and hear what they really had to say.

“I didn’t want sensational or shocking stories, because those you can get very easily online.  I wasn’t doing journalistic research: I wanted to see how people deal with the situation.”

What Jaber and Zuabi  heard — “again and again and again” —was that the refugees’ only remaining hope was god.

“That’s totally understandable,” she adds. “The Syrians are a nation completely abandoned by the rest of the world and they know it. Nobody else is listening.”

Many of the refugees also thanked the two theatrical researchers for listening and said they wanted their stories told.

That was impossible: there are too many stories to be put into a play, and in any case this is not verbatim theatre, where all the words are transcribed from real-life interviews.

Nevertheless, asked what she would like audiences to take from the production, Jaber says she hopes people “will carry those stories with them, and some awareness of the world. It’s very much about passing on people’s stories.

“But we tried to make the stories not just raw and shocking, but intimate. Horror doesn’t have to be shown.”

In addition, she says, the play’s importance is partly that “it talks about the world we live in, right now, at this very moment, in a place not very far away.”

·         Oh My Sweet Land is at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut, SE1 until 3 May; £10/£19.50.  Info: 7922 2922/ http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/oh-my-sweet-land

* Bitter onions for a sweet land

+ YouTube interview with Corinne Jaber