They’ve stormed the Reichstag, turned terrorism into absurd comedy and asked their audiences for answers. Meet five theatre-makers grappling with crises across the continent.

By Daniel Boffey, Constanze Letsch, Philip Oltermann, Helena Smith and Kit Gillet

People laugh a lot – and at the end they cry

Ismael Saïdi, Belgium

Ismael Saïdi launching a book adapted from his play Djihad. Photograph: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

A comedy about jihad? At first, no one wanted to touch it, says Belgian playwright Ismael Saïdi. “They didn’t think anyone could laugh at that.” Called Djihad, the French word for jihad, his play follows three hapless Belgian Muslims who feel compelled – for a range of tragicomic reasons – to travel to Syria, where their eyes are opened to the reality of holy war.



Echoing Four Lions, Chris Morris’s 2010 film, the satire highlights some of the absurdities of the terrorist cause and the frustrations of those drawn to it. Saïdi, whose parents are Moroccan, had plenty of material to work with. He was born in Brussels, in the suburb of Schaerbeek, an area caricatured as a breeding ground for terrorists.

“People coming from Muslim countries to Belgium was very new,” he says. “When you are young, you feel any difference in a negative way – you are afraid, you want to be like the others. You want to be the good, beautiful guy. And I was not. I didn’t know how to play soccer. But later, I felt being different was a positive, an opportunity.”

‘How can this be possible?’ … Djihad. Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

Unsure of what to do after school, he responded to a police drive for recruits from migrant communities. He expected to stay a month but, after a bumpy start, saw out 16 years. “At the beginning, we were two or three people among 2,000. Some colleagues don’t want to drive with you – they don’t feel comfortable, they don’t trust you. After three or four years, things were better.” Eventually, he left to pursue his writing.



Saïdi started Djihad in 2012, after watching French far-right leader Marine Le Pentalking about young people going to Syria. “She was saying she didn’t care about them. She didn’t want them to come back. I thought that was awful. You have to understand why people go there to fight – as they will come back to kill people. And I saw a picture on Facebook of a friend from when I was at school. He was in Syria in front of an Isis flag with a Kalashnikov in his hand. I was thinking, ‘How can this be possible? How can he be a terrorist? He was with me at school. He played with me. He went to the cinema with me. What happened?’ That’s the reason I wrote it.”

Its first performance, at a small venue in 2014, sold out without any advertising. Then, in the wake of the 2015 attack on Charlie Hebdo, schools started to get in touch with him. Parents who had taken their children to see the play were recommending it to teachers as an eye-opener.

Of the 250,000 who have now seen Djihad, 150,000 are teenagers. Saïdi is touring with a sequel, Géhenne, which follows one of the three Djihad characters into a Belgian prison. “People laugh at lot,” says Saïdi. “And at the end they cry.” Daniel Boffey

Art is not for cowards

Esmeray Özatik, Turkey

Purging patriarchal vocabulary … Esmeray Özatik in Istanbul. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images

“As a Kurdish, feminist, trans woman,” says Esmeray Özatik, “I am screwed in every way.” The activist, actor and playwright, who is at the forefront of emerging queer theatre in Turkey, has staged plays challenging violent anti-trans prejudice, gender stereotypes and body image but also militarism and anti-Kurdish nationalism. Based on her own experiences, she has performed in three major solo shows that depict respectively her journey from a small village in eastern Anatolia to Istanbul, the trauma of rape and police violence, and her sex-change surgery.



In the first, 2007’s The Witch’s Bundle, Esmeray worked with feminist performers to purge all traces of patriarchal vocabulary from the monologue. Though hyperactive and darkly humorous, the performance is cutting. In one episode, she narrates how, as a little boy, she wanted to participate in a knitting contest with the girls in her village. Putting on one of her mother’s headscarves, she joins in. While bent over her needlework deep in concentration, her brother hits her, then her father. Finally, her mother snatches the headscarf and chases her away. Wondering why she was treated with such violence, Esmeray decides that it must be because she really was a girl, since most of the women in her village suffer similar violence.

At 15, her father sent her to Istanbul to find work. Like most trans women in Turkey, where discrimination excludes them from almost all social spheres, she made a living through sex work. Not for the first time, she was raped. Years later, in an adaption of Franca Rame and Dario Fo’s play The Rape, Esmeray shares this trauma onstage. “What I want,” she told a Turkish newspaper, “is for people to ask themselves: how are you responsible for this?”

Trans activists cite Esmeray as a role model because her plays give them courage to tell their own stories. Tens of thousands have watched The Witch’s Bundle, across Turkey and in several European cities. However, conservative circles have continuously attacked her as “immoral”. One Islamist daily accused her of “provoking Muslims” and she has received threats in the street.

Meanwhile, the post-coup crackdown in Turkey has not spared the arts: Kurdish theatres have been shut down, many actors and employees of state theatres have been dismissed via emergency decrees on allegations of coup-plotting and terrorism. Last November, the Turkish capital Ankara banned all public showings of films, exhibitions, panels or theatre performances related to LGBTQ issues, citing “security concerns”.

But Esmeray is undeterred. As she recently told a Turkish reporter: “Art is not for cowards.” Constanze Letsch

I search for trauma in individuals – and in a country

Milo Rau, Switzerland



Revolution … Milo Rau. Photograph: Jean-Francois Monier/AFP/Getty Images

The International Institute of Political Murder, as Milo Rau’s production company is called, has reenacted the trials of Russian punks Pussy Riot and the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceaucescu. The Swiss playwright has also dramatised a fictional tribunal examining the role of mining conglomerates in the Congo war, and he once got a Turkish-German actress to read out the entire court statement of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian far-right terrorist.



What interests Rau, whose company is based in both Switzerland and Germany, is not so much the political themes of these stories, but how they can be connected to our own lives. In Hate Radio, he told the story of RTLM, a Rwandan radio station that in 1994 broadcast pop songs, sports bulletins – and racist propaganda that, according to a UN tribunal, contributed to the genocide. Rau grew up broadly apolitical in the post-cold war era, save for some vaguely anti-American platitudes. Could his generation, asked Hate Radio, have been as easily led astray?

A scene from The Congo Tribunal film. Photograph: IIPM

Rau’s balancing of fact and fiction has resonated with audiences worldwide: The Congo Tribunal, a film about his mining play, was screened in several Congolese cities, inspiring a court case against the government; and the play led to the resignation of two ministers. His Breivik monologue was staged at the European Parliament, and Belgian performances of Five Easy Pieces, his play about the child killer Marc Dutroux, were attended by victims’ relatives. “I’m always searching for the traumatic, tragic moments in individual lives and in a country,” he has said. Five Easy Pieces arrives at London’s Unicorn theatre in April.

IIPM’s most recent performances took the director’s hunger for reality to the next level. Last November, he organised a slightly chaotic “Storming of the Reichstag” in Berlin exactly 100 years after the storming of St Petersburg’s Winter Palace during the Russian revolution. Unlike the real event, Rau’s revolution stopped at the security fence outside the German parliament.

That same month, Rau organised what he called “the first world parliament in the history of humanity” at Berlin’s Schaubühne, with delegates from more than 60 countries. The event culminated with Rau expelling a Turkish delegate who used his speaking time to deny the Armenian genocide. The director, who has described himself as “a moderator for things that stand outside my control”, later apologised for having invited the politician in the first place. Philip Oltermann

Everyone wanted to understand what was going on

Marianna Calbari, Greece

‘Stories that make sense’ … Marianna Calbari. Photograph: Marilena Stafylidou

A plethora of crises – economic, social and political – has fuelled the demand for theatre in Greece. In the midst of unparalleled austerity, the country still outstrips every other European nation in the number of theatres it has per capita. For Marianna Calbari, the playwright, director and actor who shot to fame at the height of the country’s crisis, the stage has been a refuge. “All theatre,” she says, “has the power of consolation.”



Calbari’s play Almanac, a group of interlinking tales seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl, was written over three hot months in the summer of 2013. Revivals are now due in Athens and Cyprus. “Everyone wanted to understand what was going on,” she says. “Why people were killing themselves, losing jobs, losing homes. I wanted to explain to myself and others what was happening – and channel the anger.” Stories that revolved around suicide, divorce, family debt and chronic illness came fast. It hit a nerve and performances were packed.

Calbari says Greece’s prolonged crisis has made a playwright’s job harder. State grants were slashed, forcing many theatres to rely on ticket takings. Some closed but others, miraculously, survived. Because the crisis has lasted for so long, Calbari says audiences “want to see stories that make sense in a world that so often makes no sense. They want Chekhov, Shakespeare, Ibsen. They want answers to eternal questions.”

Calbari’s next project, three years in the making, takes its cue from the upcoming 200th anniversary of the country’s war of independence. Timed to start on 25 March – the day the uprising against Ottoman rule was initiated – it will kick off with a round table of artists, performers, historians and writers asking: who are we and how did we get here?



All of her stage work – whether written or directed – is intensely political. Between 2013 and 2017, she translated and directed six works, including Euripides’ Medea. “They all in some way revolve around the issue of power,” she says. “It is a question that has always interested me.” Helena Smith



We haven’t dealt with the past in a normal way

Gianina Cărbunariu, Romania

Building on experiment … Gianina Cărbunariu. Photograph: Radu Afrim

In her first play, 2004’s Stop the Tempo, Gianina Cărbunariu explored the uncertainty of a generation of Romanians coming of age after the fall of communism in 1989. Two later plays were drawn from the archives of the Securitate, the communist-era secret police, which she visited daily for three months. “It doesn’t feel like we’ve dealt with this past in a normal way,” she says.

When Cărbunariu set up her company DramAcum (Drama Now) in Bucharest, her aim was to promote a new type of Romanian theatre. “The style used by playwrights before 1989 was very elusive, metaphorical – at that time they were dealing with censorship. But it was impossible to go on like that.”

A later play, 20/20, investigated the wave of nationalism that followed the fall of communism, and the violent clashes between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians in the streets of Târgu Mureș. The events had rarely been spoken about for two decades, and locals were slow to open up as she conducted interviews. When the show premiered in the town, there followed a two-hour discussion with the audience. “They would bring their own stories, and this would improve the way actors performed.”

Do You Speak Silence? tackles the issue of cheap migrant labour.

Cărbunariu has tackled shale gas and fracking, ethnic divisions and discrimination, via the harsh realities of economic migration – the last in Kebab, a play initiated during a residency at London’s Royal Court. Common People, from 2016, addressed the subject of whistleblowers, what drives them and the repercussions they suffer. The play was based on interviews with three Romanians, three Britons and two Italians who drew attention to corrupt practices where they worked, with real interview clips punctuating the action.

In her latest, Sprechen Sie Schweigen? (Do You Speak Silence?), three Romanian actors, one ethnic Hungarian and two Germans explore the subject of cheap labour coming from Romania to Germany. The show focuses on the outsourcing of such jobs as elderly care, and those who risk their health and happiness to work abroad.

The title refers to the silence of many workers who tolerate bad situations because they know they won’t get help from the authorities, as well as the silence of the countries themselves. “One of the Romanian actors had worked as cheap labour in Germany,” she says. “Everyone in the team knew someone working abroad. It was part of their lives.”

In 2017, Cărbunariu became general manager of the Youth Theatre in Piatra Neamt, a small city in north-east Romania. “This theatre had a strong reputation during communism. As it was far away from Bucharest, artists wanting to do experimental work went there. That’s its DNA. I came to build on that.” Kit Gillet