The nearly seven years Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani spent detained in the Australian-run Manus Island detention centre are not easy memories.
But revisiting his refugee journey was essential in order to write a series of poems for a new adaptation of the ancient play Women of Troy.
"For this work, I really didn't want to particularly write about refugees who come to Australia but of course, I couldn't get away from my experience as someone who got in a boat and went to Australia," Boochani said.
"It was quite difficult emotionally because I had to go through that experience that I had and also all of the stories that I witnessed, the stories that I heard in that context."
Women of Troy is a tragedy by the Greek playwright Euripides, produced in 415 BC, telling the story of Athens's invasion and enslavement of the people of Melos from the perspective of the survivors.
Boochani's poems formed the lyrics set to music composed by Australian singer-songwriter Katie Noonan and performed by a chorus of Tasmanian women and girls.
The new production is part of Tasmania's Ten Days on the Island arts festival, directed by Ben Winspear and featuring actors from around Australia and New Zealand.
"Things have changed so little with humans, with politics, with our behaviours, with our hopes, our dreams, our pains that in a way it feels like it could have been written today for a contemporary audience," Winspear said.
"Women of Troy is one of the most important pieces of theatre ever made, the fact that it still speaks to us thousands of years later is testament to the intelligence of the writer."
Winspear said the new adaptation interweaved the ancient text with Boochani's new words.
"Behrouz has this incredible capacity to find hope and dreams of escape and a future," Winspear said.
"The more I hear the songs sung by the chorus, the more I believe that Behrouz could have been part of the original writing team of this piece two and a half thousand years ago.
"His reading of the text and his ability to extend on it and take fragments of those ideas and turn them into a complete poem is really amazing."
Actor and producer Marta Dusseldorp said Women of Troy remained an important story to tell.
"There are more refugees than ever in the world — as we know, there's atrocities against women and children happening every day, as we speak now, so it really is about reminding people about that, putting humanity and faces within that that are in our voice," Dusseldorp said.
The production is partnering with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), to raise money for its work.
It was a personal project for Dusseldorp and her husband Ben Winspear.
"One of the reasons that Ben and I were driven to do Women of Troy was we do quite a bit of goodwill ambassador work with Australia for UNHCR, so I've been on a few missions to the border of Jordan and Syria," she said.
"In bearing witness to those stories, you really do see the cost of war and displacement, and so for us, theatre is a really good place to explore that and let the general public into the story via fiction."
Theatregoers will be asked for donations at the end of the performance.
"It's really an opportunity for people to action how they feel, and in many ways that's what theatre is for, it is to remind people and break taboos, open subjects people don't really like to talk about," Dusseldorp said.
The Women Of Troy's seven-performance season runs from 8 to 12 March at Hobart's Theatre Royal.
