William Stirling of Refuge Productions tells us about the dangers of staging Queens of Syria and how it went on tour.

"I watched the snow fall for the third day. It was the worst weather in Jordan’s capital, Amman, for 100 years and we only had four days until the performance. “We’ll have to cancel and postpone till after Christmas,” said Omar Abusaada, Syria’s top theatre director, who we had engaged to mount this production.

I refused; we’d already cancelled one day, and our budget would not stretch to another week. “The busses will never get up the hill to the theatre,” said Omar. But when we arrived our cast were already struggling up the steep slope through three feet of snow, dragging their complaining kids. “We walked out of Syria,” said Qamar, who played Hecuba, former Queen of Troy. “We’re not going to let a snowy hill defeat us.”

We were doing a production of Euripides’ great anti-war tragedy, the Trojan Women, with an all female cast of Syrian refugees. Of the 60 women who volunteered for this project two months before, only two had been to a theatre before. According to the United Nations Refugee agency, UNHCR, there are now nearly five million Syrian refugees; 680,000 are in Syria’s tiny, peaceful neighbour, Jordan. Originally we had thought of doing the play in Zaatari, the huge refugee camp, but were persuaded by the UNHCR that the refugees eking out an existence in the cities were often lonelier and more depressed.

Oxfam had asked us to design a therapeutic drama project for Syrian refugees, after we’d finished a similar project in Africa with slum kids. The key is to find a play your workshops can identify with. Being classicists, we remembered the Trojan Women, an Ancient Greek tragedy about refugees written in 415 BC by Euripides.

The women marvelled at how closely Euripides’ story of exile and destruction mirrored their own. “This is what happened to us!” said Mahar, a pretty mother of three whose husband had had his own travel agency in Damascus. Every family had a Cassandra; everyone was Andromache or Hecuba.

Each woman told her own story in front of the group, using diagrams and acted out scenarios. This process was overseen by Omar’s team, and a Syrian refugee psychologist. The psychologist explained that for 70% of refugees just being safe, sheltered and fed was enough. 20% needed something more: to make sense of the terror and depression. 10% needed one to one psychiatric help, impossible on this scale. Eventually, he said, without these sort of programmes, all refugees would migrate into the worst 10%.

Omar Abusaada wove the women’s stories into the text. Only 25 wanted to be on stage; the others were worried about the risk to their families in Syria. Their performance was so beautiful and harrowing, that it didn’t seem possible that this community of confident, professionals could be the same nervous, lonely women as 6 weeks earlier.

Afterwards, Lena Attel, the manager of the NCCA theatre said, “They have been transformed.”

In July these women will take Queens of Syria, go on tour in the UK, coming to Oxford. As one of them, Suad, said, “I have a scream I want the whole world to hear. I wonder if it will resonate?” I think it will."

Queens of Syria is also the subject of an award winning documentary being shown as part of Off Beat Festival tonight at 10pm at OFS. www.offbeatoxford.co.uk 01865 305305.

Queens of Syria comes to the North Wall on July 11-12. 01865 319450 and www.thenorthwall.com