Lara Parmiani, of migrant-led theatre company LegalAliens, talks to Natasha Tripney about a new international production marking the 30th anniversary of Srebrenica and about artistic responsibility when telling stories that are not your own.
In 2019, Aidan Hehir, an academic at the University of Westminster who specialises in war crimes, with a focus on those committed in the former Yugoslavia, was in Sarajevo attending a conference. Find the conference a little dry for his liking, he used the opportunity travel to the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial Centre, which commemorates the more than 8000 Bosnian men and boys who were killed during the 1995 massacre. Hehir approached a tour company to take him there, but instead of a tour bus, he was greeted by Mustafa, a Bosnian war veteran turned tour guide, who had been assigned to drive him to Srebrenica. During the long drive cooped up in a stifling car, punctuated only by breaks for cigarettes and wilting sandwiches, the initially taciturn Mustafa began to open up to him and talk about the war.
When Hehir returned to the UK, he felt compelled to write about his experience, both of his visit to the memorial centre and his time with Mustafa. The resulting book, The Flowers of Srebrenica, which features illustrations by artist David Frankum, was published by Qendra Multimedia, an independent publisher in Kosovo, in 2022.
Hehir didn’t go to Srebrenica with the intention of writing a book, but something about the experience moved him to put pen to paper when he returned to the UK. He wanted to record his experiences of the place and the people he encountered there while it was still fresh in his head. In a spare yet poetic style, his book captures the inherent tension of being someone who has spent years researching the wars of the Balkans, but who did not live through it, meeting someone with lived experience of the war.
Lara Parmiani, artistic director of the migrant-led theatre company LegalAliens, first came across the book when visiting Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo, in 2023 for a theatre showcase. She loved it and read it in one sitting. Hehir’s book made a strong impression on her, as an Italian, who had been living in Milan in the 1990s, and had vivid memories of the influx of Bosnian refugees who arrived in the country during the war. Almost immediately, she started thinking about how it might work on stage. Her company, LegalAliens, has a history of telling migrant and refugee stories and a project like The Flowers of Srebrenica, allowed the company to draw their different strands of work together in one project. “It was very serendipitous,” says Parmiani.
The Flowers of Srebrenica
Hehir couldn’t imagine how his book, the bulk of which concerns his interactions with Mustafa during the long, hot road trip, would ever work on stage. “Maybe it could work on the radio,” he thought, but in the theatre? He couldn’t see it. Parmiani, however, had a very clear idea of how to make it more theatrical. To this story of two men smoking and sweating in car together, she added a female Greek chorus, who could both represent the women left behind after their sons and husbands were killed, and would allow the piece to connect the events in Srebrenica with other global conflicts. “Aidan basically gave me his book and said ‘do what you want with it’, which almost never happens with writers,” she says.
Parmiani’s research for the production took her to Bosnia where the company interviewed women about their experiences of the war. She reached out to the Sarajevo War Theatre (SARTR), which was founded in 1992 during the siege of Sarajevo, and they very quickly came onboard as co-producers. The cast features Selma Alispahić, who is part of the SARTR ensemble alongside Bosnian actor Edin Suljić, who also acted as cultural consultant on the project. The role of Aidan is alternated between Cillian O’Donnchadha and Jeremiah O’Connor at different stops on the tour. Alongside Alispahić, the Rwandan actor Taz Munyaneza and Ukrainian actor Valeriia Poholsha, make up the chorus, bringing a physical dynamism to a story that might have felt quite static and broadening the piece to include their stories. In this way the production reframes Hehir’s story as a metaphor, explains Parmiani. “The point of view is shifted – from Aidan’s to a collective almost bird’s eye view of recent human history.”
Knowing that the show would be seen not just in the UK but in Sarajevo and Tuzla too, Parmiani “felt an enormous responsibility.” She was very conscious of the fact that they were making this piece as people from outside Bosnia “arriving in Bosnia and telling people their own story.” It was a question she and the cast asked themselves a lot during rehearsals. “The only resolution we eventually found as an ensemble was solidarity,” she says. “Because we live in dangerous times and we must all resist and fight together for the truth, for respect and for a better humanity.”
Hehir felt similarly apprehensive. “Who are we to go to Bosnia and put on this play about their conflict?” At the same time, while promoting his book he encountered many Bosnian people who have “been very thankful that there are people who still care what happened to them.” Given there is a real issue with denialism and historical revisionism in the region, particularly in the Srpksa Republika, the predominantly Serbian part of Bosnia, Hehir was aware that “often people want foreigners to pay attention and help keep the memory alive.”
The Flowers of Srebrenica
The production makes use of video to try and create the effect of being a visitor to a memorial centre, encountering various displays designed to help visualise the scale of lives lost. “We wanted to create this sense of this multimedia experience that you get when you visit these places where you are bombarded with different videos and information,” says Parmiani. Towards the end, a list of the names of those who were killed fills the back wall, and the list just goes on and on.
The show premiered in Sarajevo in July. Hehir travelled there to watch the performance. At the end, there were a few seconds of silence and Hehir remembers thinking “Christ, what’s going to happen next?” Then, he says, everybody stood up and applauded. “You could tell the audience was genuinely moved and that made a huge difference,” he says. “For this audience, we did something that meant something to them, and I felt very humbled by it,” says Parmiani.
Visiting Sarajevo also gave him to reunite with Mustafa. Despite Hehir’s efforts, he had never been able to track him down over the intervening years – he only knew his first name – to tell him there was a book, and now a play, based on their encounter. While in Sarajevo, he returned to the tour company and asked if they still had a guide on their books called Mustafa, who previously worked as a dentist. They did, but it turned out to be the wrong man. Fortunately, this second Mustafa knew the real Mustafa and was able to put them in touch, so Hehir was able to invite him to the premiere. “He was quite flabbergasted,” says Hehir. The cast were all treating him like a celebrity and the performance moved him to tears. “It was really beautiful moment to meet up with him again and for him to be as wonderful as I remembered,” says Hehir.
The Flowers of Srebrenica is a book about not forgetting, and so too is the show. Thirty years on this feels as necessary as ever, perhaps more so.
The Flowers of Srebrenica is at Jackson’s Lane, London, from 14-18 October and then playing further dates in Europe.
For more information visit: LegalAliensTheatre.com
Further reading: The Flowers of Srebrenica review
Natasha Tripney is a writer, editor and critic based in London and Belgrade. She is the international editor for The Stage, the newspaper of the UK theatre industry. In 2011, she co-founded Exeunt, an online theatre magazine, which she edited until 2016. She is a contributor to the Guardian, Evening Standard, the BBC, Tortoise and Kosovo 2.0
