Kali Theatre Presents Rukhsana Ahmad's HOMING BIRDS
By: Julie Musbach Sep. 09, 2019
Kali Theatre's founder Rukhsana Ahmad returns to the company with Homing Birds, a moving new play about family, home and roots. Reversing the usual refugee story clichés, it shares the hopes, fears and aspirations of a young man searching for a place in which he feels he truly belongs.
Young Afghan refugee Saeed desperately wants to reconnect with his roots and find his long-lost sister. So he leaves his adoptive family in London and returns home to Kabul to work as a doctor, eager to contribute to rebuilding a new Afghanistan. But as past and present collide, Saeed must face up to the reality of his changed world. This captivating and evocative play asks if a place can ever be home without a connection to family and roots?
Helena Bell, director: "We share a universal human instinct to find a home, somewhere we can relax and feel safe, and although we may have more than one place in our lifetime that we refer to as home, our most powerful feelings are often connected to memories of our childhood. Homing Birds speaks to this need to 'home' and what happens when that drive is disrupted by war, famine or exile. With insight and empathy, Rukhsana's play takes us beyond the generalisations, clichés and statistics that regularly surround the refugee crisis'.
Rukhsana Ahmad is a writer, playwright and translator, with work spanning novels, stage plays, radio plays and adaptations. She co-founded Kali Theatre with director Rita Wolf in 1991 and was Artistic Director of the company until 2002. Her plays for the company included River On Fire, a Susan Smith Blackburn Award finalist. She has written many plays for stage and BBC Radio, and was a finalist for the Writers Guild Award.
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