Review: THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO, Richmond Theatre

Christy Lefteri’s 2019 bestseller The Beekeeper of Aleppo is both a powerful and poetic story about the refugee experience. Her story of Nuri and his wife Afra's escape from Syria to England was inspired by time Lefteri spent working in a refugee camp in Athens. Syria may currently be seen as less newsworthy than it was, but the issue of people displaced from their homes and seeking safety elsewhere has rarely been more discussed. So why does this important and emotional story feel flat on stage?

Adapted by Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler and produced by Nottingham Playhouse (where the show premiered), we follow Nuri, once a beekeeper in Aleppo with his cousin Mustafa, and his wife Afra. The fractured timeline shutters between their ordinary family life in Aleppo to the start of the war which results in the devastating loss of their business, home and son. We follow parts of their harrowing enforced journey; first to Turkey, then Greece and finally to England.

Adam Sina is a haunted and unreliable narrator as Nuri, dealing with profound loss and alive to the real dangers faced in his journey. Farah Saffari conveys a wife disconnected from her husband, both physically and emotionally.

However, the couple's relationship feels underdeveloped and it doesn't help that both Sina and Safarri fail to show enough distinction between their personalities before and after their traumas. There's a lot of shouting, particularly from Sina, which means some of the nuance in his words is lost.

There is lovely work from Joseph Long as affable cousin Mustafa, who maintains the thread of the positive presence of bees throughout. He also brings some light relief as an endlessly enthusiastic Moroccan man staying in the couple's bed and breakfast, desperately dropping the word 'geezer' into every conversation in order to try and fit into his new home. The remainder of the cast multi-role, with notable variation from Aram Mardourian, who conveys several nefarious and downright sinister characters.

For all its potential, the emotional heft of Lefteri's book is lacking: as we bounce between times and locations, there is little time given to develop the harrowing stories of others that they come across, nor Nuri's visions of a boy who takes the place of his dead son. Afra's blindness is caused by huge emotional trauma, but again, this is sped over too quickly to absorb the full emotional hit. There are some odd directorial decisions from Anthony Almeida: the jeopardy-filled boat crossing is supposed to convey chaos, but the cast just look messily positioned. There are several unexplained entrances and exits throughout.

The important moments of levity are also compromised; over-enthusiastic camp workers and unfeeling immigration officials come across as flat caricatures. More importantly, Lefteri's ultimate message is of hope triumphing in the end, but this production oddly flattens out the potential for any positivity about the future. 

Ruby Pugh's effective set design gives us sandy mounds, one with a bed perched atop and the other with a chair pushed into the dune-it's a flexible space with wooden shutters and a doorway set in screens where projections of the rolling sea and images of the Syrian war are flashed up. Ben Omerod's thoughtful lighting design takes us from the bucolic hills of pre-war Aleppo to the darkness of the forboding sea. 

I wanted to love this production, as the book gives such empathetic space for understanding about the actual people beneath the headlines. This play just does not do it justice.