Theatre Journal

Abstract:

How do we comprehend the scale of contemporary Syrian child displacement, much less represent it theatrically—and ethically? In this essay, I explore how the Good Chance Theatre has continued to try, through the evolving figure of Little Amal, an unaccompanied Syrian girl who appears in two transnational performances, The Jungle (2017) and The Walk (2021). Drawing on interviews with directors, actors, and puppeteers, I argue that both productions renegotiate the adoptive gaze Western European and North American audiences usually impose upon Syrian refugee children. The eight locally cast child actors that played Little Amal across The Jungle’s original tour produced a Brechtian doubling of performances that complicated violent spectatorial relations, while The Walk’s twelve-foot-tall puppet of Little Amal resists adoptive logics’ reliance on humanitarian tropes of liminality and minority.

Complicating hegemonic binaries of insider/outsider, seeing/being seen, and even life/death, The Jungle and The Walk invite Euro-American onlookers to reconsider their relation to the refugee ‘crisis,’ undercut the individual logic of adoption, and call for a collective response. Little Amal’s (not so) minor encounters, I find, lay bare the inherent theatricality of the current refugee rights paradigm as applied to displaced peoples of all ages. Reclaiming the figurative and embodied potential of the Syrian child refugee, Amal reveals mass displacement to be a shared human phenomenon: already lived by so many, and looming for all.