Couple flee to the land of milk and honey

REVIEW: The Beekeeper of Aleppo – Malvern Theatres (Tuesday, April 14 to Saturday, April 18. Wednesday and Saturday matinees).

Showtime! stars rating: * * * *

RATHER than the proverbial leap, it only takes a single footstep of the imagination to picture the utter awfulness of civil strife and all that it involves.

Wanton destruction. Savage lawlessness on what remains of the streets. Armed militias roaming at will, summarily executing anyone perceived to be an opponent. Or not.

This chilling stage adaptation of Christy Lefteri’s book poses any number of questions, the most crucial perhaps being… what would YOU do in such circumstances?

Nuri (Adam Sina) and his wife Afra (Farah Saffari) find their lives turned upside down in war-torn Syria, the city of the title becoming the epicentre of the bitter fighting that has engulfed the country.

The bees are a metaphor, mirroring the plight of the human population, the hives that are their homes being destroyed along with everything else. We learn that a single bee survives, which Nuri promptly kills.

I didn’t quite see the point of this part of the analogy. Nuri says he has done this because the solitary survivor no longer has a home, but surely the hapless insect is also a refugee, and must therefore also seek some form of sanctuary, much like its owner. Perhaps its very own land of milk and honey?

Joseph Long is the eternally optimistic Mustafa, who is as relentlessly jolly as the immigration officer (Alia Lahlou) is cold and humourless, the latter apparently intent on making the refugees’ lives as difficult as possible.

The National Health Service jobsworth is similarly obstructive, which comes across as a further bit of political point-scoring. Bearing in mind the daily news headlines, is it really that difficult to enter Britain without the necessary documents?

Meanwhile, the English Channel, over which the refugees must cross to reach their promised land, becomes an ocean of mountainous waves, courtesy of a back-projection that portrays that narrow strip of water as being akin to the seas around Cape Horn.

A little less hyperbole would have sufficed here– yes, we get the point. Leaving the French coast on what is really a glorified, overcrowded lilo is clearly a perilous undertaking.

Throughout, the misery and despair of Nuri and Afra never let up for a single second, and even when the couple are shown the occasional random act of kindness, the grim reality of their situation is always close at hand.

Tautly directed by Anthony Almeida, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a powerful production and very much a story of our times.