We view momentous events as distant observers. In an uprising, we see the flags, the occupations and the street battles and get a general sense of cause and effect. What is harder to gauge is how it feels to live through such turbulence, not just on the days of insurrection, but in the months and years on either side.
One of the strengths of You Bury Me, by the dramatist known only as Ahlam, is in its portrayal of everyday life during extraordinary times. A recipient of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Playwriting, it is set in the Cairo of 2015, but repeatedly harks back to the Arab spring of 2011. Crucially, it focuses on a group of teenagers, including the boisterous Maya (Yasemin Özdemir) who was 13 at the time of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and is now turning 18. She and her peers have been shaped, in their formative years, by a volatile combination of hope, fear and despair.
Being teenagers, they are preoccupied as much by sex as politics. The six high-voltage actors in Katie Posner’s fluid production represent characters struggling to define themselves. In a socially conservative country, it is not only the outspoken blogger Osman (Tarrick Benham) who risks persecution, it is also his gay friend Rafik (Nezar Alderazi) and his sister’s lesbian friend Lina (Eleanor Nawal). Just as risky is the Romeo-and-Juliet romance between the Coptic Christian Tamer (Moe Bar-El) and the Muslim Alia (Hanna Khogali).
In this way, there is no dividing line between the personal and the political. These young people are living with intolerance whether in private or on the streets. That one of their friends could, at any moment, become one of the disappeared only justifies their caution, not to say their rage.
On the light-touch set by Sara Perks, with its graffitied concrete blocks looming overhead, the Paines Plough co-production has a vigorous ensemble energy. There are times, though, when the stories grow long-winded, the focus more on romance than civic engagement. It can make the free-flowing structure look less poetic than rambling, much as the originality of Ahlam’s vision remains.
• You Bury me is at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, until 18 March; then Orange Tree theatre, London, 27 March–22 April
• This article was amended on 14 March 2023. Tamer is Coptic Christian, not Muslim; and Alia is Muslim, not Coptic Christian.
