Promenade performance around Oxford Castle Quarter 'a memorable experience'

The Land’s Heart is Greater Than Its Map: Promenade around Oxford Castle Quarter from July 14-17. Review by JON LEWIS

THE philosopher Jean Baudrillard mused that if a map as large as a country was placed on top of that country, what is real would be the map.

In Ramzi Maqdisi’s promenade play for the OffBeat Festival, The Land’s Heart is Greater Than its Map, the audience wears headphones listening to a poetic ‘tourist’ guide whilst Maqdisi leads a group of ‘tourists’ through their city, in this case the Oxford Castle quarter. The guide is of another, unnamed city, far away, that is under occupation.

The narrator with a calm, older voice, reminisces about his youth, and life with his grandfather, during whose time his city was occupied. In the background there is music by 9T Antiope and sounds of the city, including occasional bangs and sirens. Just as the descriptions of the golden-domed city are not the ancient towers of Oxford Castle and the city’s hills are not the Castle Mound, so the narrator’s gravelly Englishness is not the ‘real’ narrator of the story. He is an actor, a representation like Baudrillard’s map, a representation of the real author, but one that appears local.

Some of the paths taken by the audience follow in the tracks of Creation Theatre’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, memories of that play leaking into the live experience. This play becomes a palimpsest, overlaid on the previous play just as Maqdisi’s disruptive narrative covers up a history of his country told by winners, relayed by a foreign media. Stones, orchards, hills and towers in the far away city have an eternal reality. The audience stands by the waters flowing underneath Oxford castle watching a cormorant stretching its leg out whilst the narrator explains how in his city water courses were changed to benefit the invaders.

Maqdisi’s play is a protest that is unsettling. At one point, a hotel receptionist wants to know why we were standing outside her hotel. It was an unexpectedly telling metaphor for the controlling society in Maqdisi’s city. Maqdisi’s script has an entrancing power, feeding the audience’s imagination as it sees Oxford and hears about the far-away city.

A memorable experience.