NEWS & BLOG

It was a very special night for us. In our community at West London Welcome we have Iraqi and Iraqi-Kurdish community members who have arrived here in recent years by small boat. For them, watching this play with its frequent turns in emotion – dry humour to anger and then to sadness and back to hilarity – brought them to tears. Its themes of loss, inter-generational trauma, love and friendship within the British-Iraqi diaspora were at once different and incredibly familiar to our new friends from Iraq and others who are asylum-seeking from countries around the world.

We loved that this play felt like a love letter to Wembley and the diverse communities of West and North-West London, where our neighbourhoods comprise every possible nationality, language and background. Our strength in this part of London is the ordinariness of our everyday differences.

This play didn’t romanticise the refugee experience, and we burned with anger at past and more recent injustices as images of British colonial violence in Iraq flashed on the set’s TV screens. We greatly resonated with how devastating war, invasions and forced displacement is for mental health across families and time – so many of our community members are coping every day with the PTSD and OCD captured beautifully by the play’s lead. But at its heart we felt this was a celebration of humanity and of relationships, of refugees and migrants like us who are slowly repairing ourselves while looking after each other as best we know how.