The tale summarised in the promotional literature for I Dream of a Window sounds intriguing. A poet, imprisoned without pen or paper, composes a new work, and entrusts the different verses to his various cellmates.
Over time, they are released, taking the poem with them, thus forcing the poet to set out on a voyage of retrieval. What we have before us on stage, however, are oddly elliptical, if sometimes extremely powerful, fragments of this poignant story, based on the real-life experiences of Syrian poet Ghias Aljundi. Aljundi, like everyone else involved, is a member of Artists in Exile, a collective of refugees and asylum seekers, who aim to carry on with the creative careers that were curtailed in their homelands. After nearly two years of existence, this is its first professional theatre production.
The commendable aim of accessibility to non-mother-tongue English speakers does lead, under Caryne Chapman Clark's direction, to some periods of greatly over-extended mime from the four actors, interspersed with the occasional gnomic utterance ("A mountain cannot go through a window"). Maybe it's all an overarching metaphor for the disjointedness of a life in exile, but one would have thought that this would have been the perfect opportunity to correct the lament of the poet in the play - "I have nothing left, no love, no country, no voice" - and find a strong true voice to express the hopes and fears of this group of displaced people.
On the positive side, Chapman Clark, with the help of designer Nina Kobiashvili, creates some striking individual tableaux, especially when Yinka (Funmi Adewole) submerges herself under a swathe of newspaper (all those column inches, no words to describe her own situation, perhaps?). Overall, this should best be seen as a work in progress of a group whose enormous potential is yet to be realised.
I Dream Of A Window
