From life on the streets to now having starred in her first one-woman theatre show, Arwa Omaren is fulfilling her dreams as an actress.
Hecuba is the powerful and extraordinary re-working of Euripides’ great anti-war tragedy, The Trojan Women. It portrayed the Palestinian Syrian actor, who came to the UK as an asylum seeker in 2018, as the doomed Queen of Troy, Hecuba.
Hecuba’s run took place at the Voilà Festival earlier this month in the Theatro Technis in Camden. Arwa trod the boards with the support of her director and co-writer, William Stirling, as well as everyone at St Mungo’s – the organisation that helped her move away from the harsh realities of rough sleeping and homelessness and into a place she could call her own. The play is produced by the Trojan Women Project (Refuge Media Productions CIC).
Arwa combined Hecuba with her own experiences of growing up as a Palestinian refugee, in Yarmouk, Syria’s largest Palestinian refugee camp – “the mouth of the volcano” – a city fuelled by drugs and anger. Then being driven into exile herself, fresh out of drama school, when the Syrian civil war broke out on her streets.
What does it mean to be a double refugee? How does it feel to be told to “go back to your own country” when you don’t have one? Arwa tells her life journey and what drove her to leave Yarmouk, and after being thrown back in to make the most dangerous journey of all to the UK. Only to see war raging all over again.
Hecuba tells a searing story of generational displacement. Born into a family driven from British Mandate Palestine in 1948, Arwa interweaves her own experiences with those of Queen Hecuba, the woman who – after ten years of war – lost her husband, her children, and her kingdom in one night.
Since 2022, Arwa has been starring as Hecuba in five different highly acclaimed productions of Trojans UK, with a mixed cast of refugees from many other countries.
After the success of this run, Arwa now has her eyes set on performing at the Edinburgh Fringe next year – with the whole of St Mungo’s, her husband, son, and dog cheering her on.
