‘WHEN I came to Scotland, people supported us – me and my children – so much. I’ve seen lots of love from them. I didn’t see anyone negative. I’m so thankful for Scottish people. Scottish people are wonderful,” said Maryna Shmakova, project manager of the Trojan Women’s Project.
At the Macrobert Arts Centre, at the end of this month, award-winning filmmaker and former foreign correspondent Charlotte Eagar, along with award-winning filmmaker William Stirling, co-founders of the Trojan Women Project, will bring Trojans: Why Am I In Your Country? for two nights, with Ukrainians Maryna Shmakova as project manager and the distinguished, and award-winning, actress and director Vira Klymkovetska.
I got to interview all four over two days to hear how Trojans has used Euripides’s Ancient Greek drama, The Trojan Women, and swapped ancient Greek stories of the trauma of war with the testimonies of Stirling residents who have experienced their own horrors.
They take to the Macrobert stage to remind us, as Eager does straight from the beginning, that “every refugee could be us”, and that the performance “holds a mirror up to the audience and the audience looks at the people on stage and realises, those people on the news are not subhuman whatever.
“They’re people like them, with hopes and dreams whose lives have just fallen apart. There, but for a catastrophe, go us.”
Stirling, who grew up near the city, explained how Eager saw the opportunities of Euripides’s anti-war play as a perfect vehicle: “When covering Bosnia, she was interviewing refugees coming down out of the hills, telling the stories of awful things, kids being killed, being raped, all the men killed.
“Then she was reminded of the Trojan women by the BBC World Service broadcast when she had gone back to Kyiv.”
Ever gracious, the format they use Stirling credits to “a great Syrian director, Omar Abusaada”.
“He was the one who decided to hollow it out and put more of their stories in, which seems to work in terms of drama, of holding the stories together in a particular way, of the journey, of what happens. The ancient text mirrors the modern because it’s the same. It doesn’t matter where any of the people who come to our project are from, they’ve all had similar experiences.
“We had in London Saudi girls fleeing appalling domestic oppression, and that was just as easily reflected in the play as the more conventional war stories. We want people to look at the people on stage, hear their stories and go, ‘oh, that’s someone like me, a teacher, businessman, businesswoman or a mum, or whatever’.”
Artistic though it may be, it is also practical as the project, according to Eager, aims, firstly, “to help refugees overcome isolation, depression and trauma: the therapeutic side”.
She added: “By bringing them together regularly, they will inevitably become less depressed, make friends and build new communities.
“We provide them with free childcare, a free hot lunch and cover their travel expenses.
“Drama is the framework. We run drama workshops, divided into two halves. The first half are group exercises designed to help actors become part of a team. The second half is improvisation, people sharing and telling their own stories.”
Enter Stage Left, Maryna Shmakova and Vira Klymkovetska, both Ukrainian, who outlined how the play gets completed, Klymkovetska explaining the use of “real people telling their own stories – verbatim”.
“We combine verbatim, documentary theatre, collected testimonies from participants from Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. From these testimonies, we combine them with Euripides.
“What is interesting is the episodes from the Trojan Women resemble our stories.”
Shmakova remained upbeat, adding that she is “very happy that they all appeared here and now they’re rebuilding their lives here”.
For both, what is happening to their homeland is always in their mind, as they explained about family members still in Ukraine.
“My mother is a cancer survivor, which I helped to treat,” said Klymkovetska. “Now she starts to have problems with health. I was looking into how I can go to Ukraine to support. It’s impossible. Kyiv is attacked every day.
“My brother is on the front line as well and he’s the last in my close family who I have. I lost count of how many friends I lost.”
For Shmakova, it is her father who had cancer: “I’m a lone mother, how I could go to my father to see him a last time? I just couldn’t. It’s dangerous in Kharkiv. I was terribly depressed that I couldn’t go to my father and say goodbye.”
The Trojan Women’s Project gives them something positive to focus on.
Klymkovetska said: “From the very beginning, we wanted to help people to improve their English. Many were shy, trying to speak in their own language, but now they are making so much effort to learn lines in English. Every day they get better.”
As for the performance itself, Stirling explained: “They were determined to do it in English rather than in Arabic and other languages. So, they will have a script in hand, but there will be movement and lights and sound and whatever.”
Whatever people may think of the women involved, their experience in Scotland, as Eagar detailed, is not what some would have you believe.
“Scotland has been very welcoming to refugees,” she said.
“Most of the migrants we meet are staggered they’re not allowed to work. They come from societies where they have to work to survive and want to get working as soon as possible to earn money to build themselves.
“I’ve never met a single one who said, ‘oh yeah, I came here to live off the welfare state’.”
Like the project itself, Trojans: Why Am I In Your Country? leaves two legacies.
Firstly, “their testimonies for the oral history archive which will be placed in Stirling University”. Secondly, as Klymkovetska Maryna Shmakova eagerly set out: “We expect that our group will progress to employment.
“For example, we had a person who was a professional in biking as a sport, and she [Charlotte] linked him to a biking association because there may be people who would help him.”
To support the positive work being done by the project, you can catch Trojans: Why Am I In Your Country? on Thursday and Friday this week at the MacRobert Arts Centre at the early time of 6pm.
