By Grace Hatchell-I’m writing this with one hand on my satchel and the other trying not to spill tea over Euripides, which is harder than it sounds when ancient tragedy turns up before lunch.
This one arrived in my satchel carrying 2,500 years of grief, exile, survival and one very important question: Why am I in your country?
At this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Palestinian Syrian actor Arwa Omaren brings Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? to Gilded Balloon – The Turret at Teviot from 5 to 31 August 2026, performing daily at 11.50am. And before anyone says, “Grace, that sounds a bit heavy for a morning slot,” yes, love, it does. But sometimes the most urgent post has to be opened early.
This powerful one-woman show fuses Euripides’ The Trojan Women with Arwa’s own lived experience as a Palestinian Syrian refugee. It asks what happens when the ancient queen of war becomes a modern woman standing at the UK border, carrying not just myth, but memory.
Arwa Omaren, who trained as an actor in Damascus, plays Hecuba, the fallen Queen of Troy. But this is not simply a classical role dusted off and placed under stage lights. Arwa brings her own story into the room too: fleeing the Syrian war, seeking asylum in Britain, sleeping on the streets, facing homelessness, and trying to rebuild a life after displacement.
And then there is Jacko, her beloved golden retriever, the dog she had to leave behind when she fled Syria. Honestly, I can handle Greek tragedy, border systems and ancient queens, but you bring a dog into it and I’m emotionally undone faster than a wet paper bag on a Yorkshire bus route.
Directed and co-written by award-winning filmmaker William Stirling, Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? has already been nominated for an Offie, recognising both the production’s fusion of classical text and contemporary testimony, and Arwa’s solo performance. It is produced by the Scottish-founded Trojan Women Project, an international initiative that pairs and mentors refugee performers, using Greek tragedy as a way of processing displacement and reclaiming stories through the voices of those who have lived them.
That matters.
Because this is not theatre standing at a safe distance, patting itself on the back for being “important.” This is theatre where the person telling the story has earned the right to tell it. Arwa is not borrowing pain for dramatic effect. She is placing myth beside lived experience and asking the audience to look properly.
The show explores borders, bureaucracy, hospitality and exclusion. Which sounds like the sort of phrase you might find in a policy document, except here those words are not abstract. They are human. They are about where someone sleeps, who lets someone in, what language is used to describe a person in need, and who gets treated as a threat instead of a guest.
Set inside The Turret at Teviot, one of Gilded Balloon’s intimate Fringe spaces, this feels like the kind of production that benefits from closeness. Some shows want spectacle. This one sounds like it wants presence. The audience is not being asked to sit back and admire the scenery. They are being asked to listen.
Arwa’s own journey is extraordinary. She arrived in the UK to claim asylum in 2018 after fleeing war-torn Damascus, walking through Kurdistan for weeks and swimming across rivers while risking death and sexual assault. She has since built a new life in Britain with her husband Jonathan and their son Arthur, who is the first member of Arwa’s family to have citizenship in three generations.
Now then. If that sentence does not stop you in your tracks, I’d check your emotional batteries.
Arwa’s career spans theatre, film, television and radio. She trained at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus, appeared on stage as Gertrude in Hamlet at Al Hamra Theatre, worked in Syrian film and television, and has featured in BBC Radio 4 dramas including Yarmouk Holy Mountain and Hay el Matar. Since 2022, she has performed as Hecuba in several acclaimed productions of Trojans UK, adaptations of The Trojan Women featuring refugee casts from different countries.
The Trojan Women Project itself works with refugees and asylum seekers through theatre, storytelling and oral history. Its work aims to tackle isolation and trauma while giving refugees a public platform to share their experiences. The project’s accompanying podcast, Why Am I In Your Country?, continues that conversation beyond the stage.
At a time when migration is so often reduced to slogans, shouting and newspaper-friendly panic, Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? seems to offer something more difficult and more necessary: a human voice.
Not a statistic.
Not a headline.
Not a debate point.
A woman. An actor. A mother. A refugee. A queen of Troy. A person asking why compassion so often arrives with conditions attached.
And that, dear reader, is the sort of thing Grace keeps in the careful pocket of her satchel. Not because it is easy to carry, but because it matters.
Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country? runs from 5 to 31 August 2026 at Gilded Balloon – The Turret at Teviot, Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Show information
Title: Hecuba: Why Am I In Your Country?
Dates: 5–31 August 2026
Time: 11.50am
Venue: Gilded Balloon – The Turret at Teviot
Duration: 55 minutes
Language: English
Age guidance: 14+
Performer/Creator: Arwa Omaren
Directed and co-written by: William Stirling
Produced by: Trojan Women Project
Presented by: Gilded Balloon
Content warnings: Themes of war, violence, death and rape are discussed
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