Fathers are having a hard time of it at the Royal Court, where a generation of young men are sacrificed to the corrupt ideologies of their elders in Liwaa Yazji’s Goats. Developed as part of a long-running collaboration with writers from Syria and Lebanon, and translated by Katharine Halls, this agonisingly pessimistic play shows a society that documents its own atrocities on YouTube while denying that they exist.
In the first act, which opens at a mass funeral of young “martyrs”, the blame appears to lie with the complicity between the media and the political establishment (eloquently personified in Sirine Saba’s slippery TV presenter and Amer Hlehel’s bombastic anchorman turned local politico). Each bereaved family is to be given a goat to replace their lost sons – an act of political appeasement which is also a publicity stunt.
In the second act, the camera turns on the young men themselves – lippy, spliff-smoking teenagers awaiting their call-up, whose older brothers have recorded themselves machine-gunning hostages, or begging for help, in final phone calls home. Here, the central victims are Amir El-Masry’s all too plausibly brutalised returnee soldier, Adnan, who punishes his mother and his pregnant wife for the horrors he has seen, and Carlos Chahine’s tragically dignified schoolteacher, whose insistence on his right to view the human remains in his son’s ceremonial coffin can have no happy outcome.
Goats is a richly anecdotal account of a conflict with no obvious solution. While the human cost is harrowingly demonstrated in Hamish Pirie’s production, I felt politically disorientated. “When a father says to his son: ‘I want you to be a hero and make us proud’, it means: ‘Go and die!’” shouts Adnan. Are we simply to believe that Syria’s problems are a regional re-enactment of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons – with goats?
