Oh My Sweet Land: Modern Plays
Ebook
Overview
They call it a civil war, but there is nothing civil in this. Nothing civil at all.
They came from Damascus, from Halab, from Banias where the bombs fall day and night and the wounded children look like sleeping angels. Now they live in camps and abandoned buildings in Lebanon or Jordan. Now Syria is just a distant memory, a home forever lost.
This urgent and extraordinary play explores the crisis in Syria through the stories of its two million refugees.
Oh My Sweet Land received its UK premiere at the Young Vic Theatre, London, on 9 April 2014.
Amir Nizar Zuabi’s urgent and extraordinary play explores the crisis in Syria through the stories of its two million refugees.
’Moves one because of its provenance . . . The tone . . . is more poetic than rancorous and steeped in sorrow rather than in hate . . . The play makes a direct appeal to our emotions and our sense of guilt’ Guardian on I Am Yusuf and This Is My Brother
‘A powerful and highly personal piece . . . Belatedly but most beautifully, a drama about the appalling tensions of 1948’. Independent on I Am Yusuf and This Is My Brother
‘There is both a timeless quality and a flavour of the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict to a show that also has witty magical-realist properties . . . Zuabi’s dialogue is capable of great lyrical intensity . . . A very powerful experience.’ Independent on The Beloved
’It’s not often that, as soon as a play has finished, I wish it could start over again.’
Evening Standard on The Beloved
play text
The desperate plight of Syria’s two million refugees is searingly and sensitively communicated in this one-woman show . . .
Nizar Zuabi’s script is poetic in its descriptions . . . and occasionally we are jolted into the violent reality of what is happening.
. . . extraordinary piece . . . the writing acquires a literary self-consciousness . . . As so often, the theatre shows its capacity to take an event that is constantly in the headlines and give it a recognisable human face.
Truth and fiction intermingle in . . . Amir Nizar Zuabi’s text . . . Zuabi’s poetic text makes them [the stories] as fragrant as the food . . . It’s a cri de coeur, not a call to arms.
Zuabi writes with spare poeticism . . .
The writing offsets brutality with tenderness and flashes of humour . . . the narrative is vivid. Scenes of ordinary domesticity collide with horrific violence, and life hinges on the absurdities of chance, amid a riot of images . . . This, in the end, is the plays achievement: to thrust before our eyes a clutch of unforgettable snapshots from the bloody heart of devastation.
- Title: Oh My Sweet Land
- Author: Amir Nizar Zuabi
- Series: Modern Plays
- Publisher: Methuen Drama
- Print Publication Date: 2014
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Pages: 48
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781472589415, 9781472589392, 1472589394, 1472589416
- Resource ID: LLS:9781472589415
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-04-22T13:46:24Z
Amir Nizar Zuabi trained as an actor at the Nisan Nativ drama studio and is a founder of the ShiberHur Company. As a director, theatre work includes Alive from Palestine, When the World was Green (Young Vic); Stories Under Occupation (Al Kassaba, Ramallah); Voligo Andare In Prigone (Collosseo Theatre, Rome); Jidaria - Mahmoud Darwish (Palestinian National Theatre); Forget Herostratous; Tale of Autumn (Al Midan, Haifa); War or More, Sneeze and Other Shorts (ShiberHur); Samson and Delilah (Vlamsse Opera House). As a writer, work includes Clinging on Stone; Album; War or More; I am Yusuf and This Is My Brother; and The Beloved.