A Question of Geography

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This was an RSC production that opened at The Other Place theatre in Stratford on 2nd September 1987 and played in repertoire for the rest of the Stratford season before transferring to the Pit theatre at the Barbican, where it opened on 23 November 1988. Orignal production by Théâtre Nationale de Marseilles Novemeber 1984.

Production photographs by Donald Cooper

Awards

Olivier Awards – Actress of the Year in a Revival
Harriet Walter for the role of Dacha in the Barbican Pit (and for 12th Night and 3 Sisters also at the RSC)

Author's Note

For Nearly two centuries the world has lived historically – that is to say, the upheavals of the period have been largely explained in the name of History. Many of these explanations remain valid. But time/history is inseparable from space/geography and perhaps the most widespread pain of our time has been suffered and inflicted geographically, the consequence of distance, uprooting, emigration, enforced either politically or economically, and pitiless isolation. Emigrants, the populations of concentration camps across the world, refugees, represent the most typical suffering of our century. We live in a world where the majority have been rendered homeless if not roofless, because they have been obliged or forced to leave. A new cruelty of distance has been conceived, developed and imposed. In the name of one historical logic to another, people are town apart. History's agony has transformed geography.

The term no-man's land was coined on the Western Front in the First World War, where massed troops from all over the world were concentrated and isolated on an unprecedented scale. Today the term may describe the habitation of hundreds of millions.

Nevertheless victims are seldom passive; the ingenuity, the sheer cunning of the spirit is, in the long term, irrepressible. So women, children, men create invisible makeshift homes out of the intangible: out of memories, out of the passing moment, out of faith, attentive to love however precarious, sometimes mutual aid, always with a kind of pride. The bricollage of the soul continues even in the most soulless circumstances. The homeless contract their present as best they can, and defying the cruelty of geography and what they are told of history, they are obliged to interrogate the timeless. In view of this, their priorities are different from those who enjoy security and this is refleted in their prayers, their obscenities and their findings.

Our play is about some of the finding.

John Berger