She began shaping them into her latest play, Goats, now at the Royal Court in London. “Then I realised all of a sudden that what I was following was how we normalise surreal happenings in war. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianDark and bitterly funny, Goats is set in a small Syrian village where the eponymous animals are handed out by authorities to families who lose fathers, sons and husbands in the endless civil war. All the major, shocking events are drawn from details Yazji had compiled over years of war and exile. In contrast, the people whose lives unfold around the goats of her play live far from the frontline, in areas that have never slipped from the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

Source: The Guardian November 28, 2017 17:29 UTC