Tonight (Saturday) on the World Service there’s a chance to hear a most unusual play, which takes us into the heart of life on the Persian Gulf.
Tonight (Saturday) on the World Service there’s a chance to hear a most unusual play, which takes us into the heart of life on the Persian Gulf. Al Amwaj (The Waves) was written by a group of writers from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, brought together by the World Service and the British Council. They were commissioned to create a single drama that would ‘reflect the things they care about’ for an audience of listeners in all corners of the globe. So seven writers gave us seven separate stories within a single one-hour drama. It can’t have been an easy thing to pull off, writers being notoriously bad at team-playing, but the result (woven together in a two-day script workshop, led in Qatar by the veteran radio writer Nick Warburton) had an unexpected coherence.
Noor Alam is a taxi driver on his way to the airport to pick up a customer. She turns out to be a young widow, whose husband was killed in ‘The War’. Which war? It doesn’t matter. He’s dead anyway, on a mission and for a cause she cannot believe in. Now she’s on her way to his family’s property by the sea, in the hope that she will be able to sell it and use the money to move on to another life. In another car bound for the same destination is the man who plans to buy it, along with his sister, for whom their seaside outing has another resonance. She used to meet her lover in the fairground and once got caught on the Death Train with him.
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