DIRECTOR’S NOTE
In 2013 Vox Motus’s producer Susannah
Armitage brought our attention to a
recently published novel, Hinterland
by Caroline Brothers.
It told the story of two children, orphaned
brothers from Afghanistan, making their way on
foot to the UK. And so Aryan and Kabir began
to embed themselves in both our conscience
and imagination.
Formerly a journalist for Reuters and the
International New York Times, Caroline’s novel
was shot through with a journalistic rigour.
Although Aryan and Kabir are fictitious, every
event that happens to them came directly from
Caroline’s interviews and encounters with young
refugees and asylum seekers across Europe.
When we first read the novel, the story of
‘unaccompanied children’ seeking asylum
across Europe felt very under-the-radar. It’s
with great sadness that we recently recalled a
conversation where, knowing this production
was going to take a number of years to become
a reality, we wondered if the story would still be
pertinent by the time we put our creation out
into the world.
But the refugees kept coming, in greater and
greater numbers. Getting younger and younger.
And the daily headlines in the UK documented
this growing refugee crisis daily, often in bold
and divisive headlines. We began to wonder if
there was space in all of this for the story of two
brothers, practically invisible to the worlds they
move through. The larger, political, news-cycle
narrative was depressing and overwhelming.
We knew we needed to find a story-telling form
that would bring this back to the truly personal:
just you, the audience, and two brothers,
together on a journey.
When we first went to meet Caroline in Paris
she took us to a number of locations that
feature in the book. We met several young
Afghans queuing at a soup kitchen and were
immediately struck by their enthusiasm and
their resourcefulness. They were on the front
foot. They were thinking forward to the next
move, the next stop on their journey. Despite
the obvious hardships, they were not victims.
When we began working with playwright
Oliver Emanuel on the adaptation, we are
approached Aryan and Kabir’s story as a 21st-
century odyssey: a long journey marked by
many changes of fortune, where the brothers’
encounters conjure images of demons, beasts,
allies and deities.
Children are resilient. They are designed
to survive. This is the story we wanted to
tell: the story of children with remarkable
resourcefulness, imagination and stamina.
We know no better way to communicate this
than as an immersive experience, rich with
imaginative, visual storytelling that allows us
into the minds of the boys and celebrates and
honours their bravery and determination.
CANDICE EDMUNDS & JAMIE HARRISON
Co-Artistic Directors, Vox Motus
*As of May 2017 the United Nations Children’s Fund counted 300,000
unaccompanied and separated children moving worldwide. These
are the documented cases. Of these 100,000 were caught trying to
cross the US-Mexican border and 170,000 lone child refugees sought
asylum in Europe.