The play will explore questions of identity and home.
Suppliants of Syria is set to take over Hoxton Hall from 3 to 8 March 2026, inviting London audiences into a powerful conversation about asylum, identity and belonging. Performed nightly at 7:30pm, the multimedia production takes inspiration from Aeschylus’s Suppliants, the ancient Greek play about women fleeing conflict. It reframes its themes through the lived experiences of Syrian refugee women today.
Created by Border Crossings, an intercultural multimedia theatre company, Suppliants of Syria asks what it really means to seek asylum, escape war and persecution, and start again in unfamiliar territory. Rather than speaking about refugees, the work centres their perspectives, using their voices and testimonies to question how the West draws both physical and metaphorical borders.
Developed with female Syrian refugees in Adana, Turkey, the play fuses live performance, movement, and film to create a layered dialogue that spans time, gender, and geography. In 2023, Border Crossings hosted a series of theatre workshops in Adana with Syrian women from the Meryem Kadın Kooperatifi, an initiative that champions employment and empowerment through agricultural and work projects. In collaboration with Çukurova University’s Film Department, those workshops produced moving scenes and testimonies woven directly into the production.
As the stories unfold on stage, audiences are invited not only to witness but to reflect. The piece actively encourages viewers to interrogate the role of the media in shaping public attitudes towards people seeking asylum, and to consider how narratives can humanise or dehumanise those at the centre of global displacement.
Running alongside the performances, ARRIVING, BECOMING, BELONGING is Border Crossings’ outreach programme, designed to bring local refugees into the creative process through art, music, dance and other participatory activities. The aim is to build community, foster dialogue and extend the impact of the production beyond the theatre walls.
Suppliants of Syria is supported by the British Council’s Creative Collaborations Grant Programme, the Anna Lindh Foundation and Arts Council England.
Tickets are on sale now.
GO: Visit www.bordercrossings.org.uk for more information.