Behind the Scenes of Cats

The ensemble was one of the most varied casts in terms of nationalities that Seenaryo has ever worked with on a play – with participants from Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Palestine, Syria and Jordan. After more than six months of workshops, rehearsals and performances, the group had grown into one big, extended family. One of the participants, 16 year old Sudanese refugee Sadeel, said that the experience for her was, “Almost surreal, almost fictional. We are trying to transform imagination into reality. It was a lovely experience to interact with new people, all from different nationalities [and] we really created our own society here in this experience with Seenaryo.”

The play was written by Sudanese writer Mohammed Hussein, with the participants collaboratively creating the dialogue and characters using Seenaryo’s participatory theatre techniques. Mohammed explained that the play grew from an idea he’d long had about how refugees are treated in their host communities. “One day, I saw a cat from where I lived in my building in downtown Amman. It looked really depressed after being kicked out of its home. I thought about its life, then I thought about our lives. In the end, we’re all creatures trying to live in harmony together.” 

The real life cat became a cast of fictional cats in the play. The cats experience displacement after a natural disaster separates them from their mother and forces them to journey to a new home. There, they discover they can live together in harmony with the other animals they find in their new host community. However this does not come without its challenges. The cats encounter humans on their journey, who are unsure about committing to looking after them. They also meet charity workers who are more focused on meeting their targets than really supporting the displaced kittens.

The many challenges of humanitarian crises are depicted on stage and are up for interpretation, with the plight of refugees being at the heart of the story. Indeed Seenaryo, through continuing to bring people together and elevate under-represented narratives, hopes to challenge biases and prejudices both locally and globally, to improve the lived realities of those experiencing unprecedented levels of crisis, displacement and upheaval. As with any piece we create, each performance received different interpretations from the audience. 

One of the participants mother’s noted after watching the performance, “When you live a story in reality and then see it depicted in theatre, it delivers a message that you weren’t able to share with the world at the time. We didn’t know how to share our message then, whether with the local community or relevant authorities.”

The plight of minority refugees in Jordan is a narrative that often falls on deaf ears. In 2015, 1.2 million Syrian refugees fled to Jordan, with the crisis receiving a high level of global attention. Yet the level of global attention that met the Syrian crisis has noticeably been missing for Sudanese, Somali, Yemeni, Iraqi and other non-Syrian refugees. Namarig Yacoub, the assistant director of CATS and a member of the Sudanese community in Amman, raised her voice at a recent event noting that continually in Jordan and globally, calls for action on Palestine eclipse the war unfolding in Sudan, which is hardly mentioned on public stages or in the media. 

Namarig was training to be a doctor in Sudan before being forced to flee and has been unable to practise as a medical professional in Jordan due to restrictions on what fields non-Syrian refugees can practise. She said that theatre has given her hope again since coming to Jordan. Having trained with Seenaryo as  a theatre facilitator, actor and director, she is now “focused on changing lives through theatre.”

We interviewed Namarig after CATS finished and she wanted to remind us of the current situation in Sudan. She said, “476 days have passed since the first bullet was fired and the war broke out in Sudan, a war that began on April 15, 2023 in a sudden manner without warning, and which many do not know about due to the media blackout. The often deliberate blackout…has led to a lack of global awareness of the war. As Sudanese women outside the homeland, we are trying hard to provide assistance, but due to the harsh war conditions that Sudan is going through, we cannot do more than speak out to convey what is happening.” 

Despite the many challenges faced by their communities, the ensemble of CATS came together to weave a shared narrative – a tapestry of stories – highlighting and elevating often unheard perspectives. Namarig said, “Through the humble platform [of theatre] I appeal to the whole world to look into the issue of the Sudanese war, talk about it, and raise awareness so that everyone knows what is happening in Sudan now.”