This Flesh Is Mine. Brian Woolland

      Cast

      Thanks to: Al-Hasaniya Morrocan and Arab Women Group; Petra Nowak at the Anna Lindh Foundation; Richard Shotton and the UK Anna Lindh Network; Pete Staves at Arts Council England; Jonathan Chadwick at AZ Theatre; Carole McFadden, Neill Webb, Alan Smart, Suha Khuffash & Haneen Tartir at the British Council; Caroline Townsend, Gregg Fisher, Peter Maccoy, Nick Moran, Anna Terry and all at CSSD; Chickenshed Theatre; Mariam Maqsood and Sarah Al-Faour at Edge of Arabia Gallery; Fraser Kent; Yazan Khalili; Jonathan Meth and Steve Tiller; Conall Morrison; Mohamed Masharqa at the Palestinian Mission; Martial Kurtz at Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Refugee Youth Project; Oliver Carruthers, Rosa Dunn, Dan Lines and all at Rich Mix; Rose Bruford College; Iman Abou Atta, Catriona Hands and Sarah Barnes at SCE-ME; Jasmine Ford, Laura Tuggey and all at Testbed 1; Rachael Stevens and Jessica Turtle at Wonderbird; Zoukak Theatre (Beirut) and all who participated in the development workshop there. Huge thanks to all whose help came too late to be acknowledged here. Special thanks to Meg Dobson for her marketing work in the early stages.

      The origins of This Flesh is Mine

      It is rarely easy to pinpoint where a play originates, or where specific ideas come from. But in the case of This Flesh is Mine, the starting point is very clear. In 2007, I was asked by the Panhellenic Association of Teaching Drama to run a series of educational drama workshop for Greek teachers, focusing on The Iliad. At the time it felt like carrying coals to Newcastle and I made clear that it was likely that the teachers taking part in the workshop would probably know The Iliad better than I did. The focus of the workshops, however, was to explore how such a text could be introduced to young people in a way which would stimulate curiosity and a desire to explore the text for themselves, rather than fostering the sense of inadequacy that students often feel when faced with a text such as The Iliad, which carries so much cultural weight. In every one of those workshops, the participants found new ways of exploring the material; and, whatever the work did for them, it greatly enriched the material for me. I found myself returning to The Iliad with ever-increasing fascination. On my return to the UK, I discussed with Michael Walling the possibility of developing a play very loosely based on The Iliad. And that was where it started.

      At that stage I had no conception of the form that the play itself might finally take, although I knew that it would explore some of the themes of dispossession and occupation, obsession and delusion that had appeared in the workshops.

      It was during those workshops that I became intrigued by a moment early in The Iliad when the goddess Até (sometimes translated as Delusion) visits Agamemnon and convinces him that he should take Achilles’ slave girl, Briseis, for his own. This is the incident which enrages Achilles and sparks the cycle of revenge which drives the action of The Iliad. The notion of self-styled ‘great leaders’ visited by Delusion seemed particularly wry and potent in the aftermath of the horrific conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And although Delusion does not appear as a character in this draft of the play, her spirit is never far from the Achaean kings.

      I would like to express my thanks to all those who participated in the various Iliad workshops: in Greece; at the NATD conference in Oxford; at Rose Bruford College; at Zoukak studios in Beirut, at the Refugee Youth Project, Croydon; and the Al-Hasaniya Morrocan and Arab Women Group; to Village Writers (who offered valuable comments on scenes from early drafts); to Michael Walling for his continuing enthusiasm for the project over such a long period of gestation; I am particularly indebted to the cast and all at Ashtar Theatre for advice and collaboration throughout the rehearsal process. Their contributions have been vital to the making of the play.

      And above all, my special thanks to my wife, Hilary Garrett, for her love and support.

      Brian Woolland

       Myths and Modernities

      For a long time, I’ve wanted Border Crossings to engage with the cultures of the Middle East. Our work is about intercultural dialogue, both internationally and within our own evolving British society – and in the 21^st century that mission makes the region, with its huge geopolitical significance, the space to which we are inescapably drawn.

      For artists, as for diplomats and politicians, the challenge is to engage meaningfully without adopting the inappropriate and dangerously arrogant stance of moral arbiter; to recognize how we are implicated in the complexities of the region without apportioning praise and blame around its conflicts. Art needs to recognize and embrace complexity, not to pander to the simplistic and reductive agendas implied by the desire for quantifiable ‘outcomes’. Art can contribute to social, cultural and political progress only if it penetrates beneath