Aylesbury Waterside Theatre – until Saturday 7th March 2026
Reviewed by Rachel Clark
4****
A powerful very well presented storyline The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a novel from Christy Lefteri and adapted for the stage by Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangelr. This is a UK Productions Ltd play and a presentation of the Nottingham Playhouse production.
This is the playwrights words is ‘An attempt to tell THE Syrian refugee story’ and in my opinion they achieved it. It was seeing the story in the eye of the refugee’s and it is powerful. It is serious and intense but there is still the odd humour in it when the refugees comment how we like tea with milk and call people ‘geezers’. The NHS couldn’t register the refugees as patients as there was a typo on the paperwork – the computer won’t accept it, I think we have experienced that for ourselves!
It is a story of Nuri played by Adam Sina and Afra played by Farah Saffari and along with their son live in war torn Syria. They spend time with the Cousin – Mustafa played by Joseph Long . Mustafa is a Beekeeper Nuri becomes one. They stay in Syria as along as possible nurturing the bees until the hives are destroyed in the war and they know the bees won’t survive long without hives and it becomes too unsafe to stay there. Eventually Nuri and Farah leave to cross Europe to England and follow Mustafa who eventually ends up in Yorkshire. We follow their journey and along the way Nuri takes under his wing a boy travelling along as he has lost his parents. Afra has lost her sight – I didn’t feel her part was that strong in the play even though one of the main characters, it was more about Nuri and Mustafa as their voices projected better. Nuri was really good, word perfect, clear voice and he held your attention. Mustafa was also superb and brought some lightness to the play with some jokes/comments on how the English are portrayed. Another person that stood out to me was Princess Khumalo – she played Lucy Fisher the case worker in the UK for Nuri and his wife and also played the part as Ageliki. Dona Atallah played Mohammed the boy travelling alone and Sami – Nuri and Afra’s son (she was very good, lively , dashing around the stage).
The scenery definitely needs a mention, simplest and no changes but oh, so effective, it was like screens and they had digital effects, so it changed to be the sea, the house, greenery and at the end the screens dropped for a really effective beach scene, there were also pictures of war-torn Syria.
A great play, powerful, effective and the story they were telling came across very
well.