‘A vital force at the Citizens Theatre’
There is a particular kind of theatre that doesn’t simply ask you to watch – it demands that you reckon. Produced by Bijli Productions, Revolution Days, now playing at the Citizens Theatre, is exactly that. Urgent, unsparing and devastatingly well-crafted, this is one of the most vital pieces of writing to grace a Glasgow stage in recent memory.
Mariem Omari’s play follows Samira, a young aid worker of mixed Scottish-Iranian heritage, who in 2010 travels from Glasgow to Jordan on the eve of the Arab Spring. She arrives armed with a camera, a fierce sense of purpose, and the kind of steely composure that insists it doesn’t cry. What unfolds is a portrait of bearing witness – photographing, reporting, offering aid, attempting to spark change – and of what it costs a person to stand at the edge of history and look it directly in the face.
Samira’s dual heritage gives her a specific vantage point, neither fully inside nor outside the crisis she has travelled toward. Yet proximity has a way of collapsing distance. As she encounters real accounts from civilians caught in the unrest, voices that cut through the play with raw, winding force, the violence stops being something observed from afar and becomes something lived. The toll is rendered with shattering precision: Samira’s hair falls out, slowly, gradually, strand by strand.
Omari’s writing is a force to be reckoned with. She moves with confidence between the harrowing and the human, threading moments of dark and light through material that could easily have become overwhelming. The result is a play that earns its emotional weight: one that stares the realities of the Arab Spring full in the face and trusts its audience to do the same.
Directed by Shilpa T-Hyland, the production breathes life into every word with a clarity of vision that holds the whole piece together. T-Hyland understands the material’s rhythms intimately, when to press and when to release, when to let silence do its work. Occasional scene transitions feel abrupt, even jarring – but crucially, this never feels like a flaw. In a play about dislocation and trauma, that discomfort is the point. The staging earns its rougher edges.
Olivia Hemmati, as Samira, is nothing short of extraordinary. Alone on stage for the entire running time, she carries the production with a physicality and presence that is genuinely breathtaking to watch. Each character she inhabits – shifting accents, postures, emotional registers with fluid, possessed precision – lands with full conviction. She doesn’t perform the story so much as let it move through her. It is a virtuoso piece of acting, the kind that makes you forget you’re watching a performance at all.
Jen McGinley’s set and costume design achieves something deceptively difficult: a stripped-back space. Wooden crates, boxes, and backpacks that nonetheless transport completely. The simplicity is the point; it keeps focus where it belongs while anchoring the play firmly and authentically in its world.
Particularly striking are the video interludes, curated and designed by Lewis den Hertog. Street footage, news segments, and the raw visual texture of the unrest played as Samira watched alongside us. It is an elegant and effective device: the audience becomes a witness too, tethered to Samira’s experience, the revolution given shape and presence beyond words alone.
The production is completed by lighting design, sound design, and composition from Benny Goodman, Nik Pagnet-Tomlinson, and Niroshini Thambar, respectively – a trio whose contributions are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the piece. Bold, stark and precisely calibrated, they never announce themselves but are felt in every moment.
Revolution Days is the kind of theatre that stays with you. It is urgent, important, and alive – a piece that says something true about the world and refuses to let you forget it.
Revolution Days ends it run at the Citizens Theatre tomorrow. Tickets here.