REVIEW: SAFE HAVEN by Chris Bowers at Arcola Theatre until 7 February 2026
‘There’s a dramatic punch to this play which lingers quite a while after you leave the theatre.’ ★★★ ½
It’s 1990 and Saddam Hussain has just been driven out of Kuwait. Now he has turned his attention to the loathed Kurds – which results in one of modern history’s most ruthless genocides. The first few scenes in this play are wordily didactic as the playwright seeks ways of making it completely clear what is happening. After all there are people in the audience who aren’t old enough to remember these incidents although there were many Kurdish people there on press night. Perhaps the clumsiness in the script was unavoidable.
After a few minutes the six-hander play settles and proceeds to switch pretty seamlessly between scenes – predominantly a pregnant woman fleeing to the bitterly cold mountains in Iraq and diplomats in London working – against their own political constraints, and the Americans who have a different agenda - to find ways of saving the lives of the beleaguered Kurds. Also in the mix is a Kurdish doctor in London (Mazlum Gul - good) lobbying everyone he can get access to on behalf of his desperate compatriots at home. The writer Chris Bowers has been a diplomat and a journalist in war zones. This is a world he knows and understands very well. The titular safe haven was the eventual terminology chosen because “enclave” was seen as provocative.
There is a startlingly convincing performance from Beth Burrows as Catherine, a passionate, right-thinking diplomat determined to make a difference. She speaks with her eyes and holds the audience from the start – the play opens with her in a quasi mini-monologue. Lisa Zahra is impressive too – doubling as forthright wife to Catherine’s boss and the warm kind woman who helps her friend on the mountain.
Director Mark Giesser makes imaginative use of the simplicity of Arcola’s Studio 2 rectangular space with seating on three sides. Loose curtain screens create two entrances and we readily believe that we’re in a Whitehall office, a home counties garden or homeless, cold and lonely in the inhospitable mountains of Iraq. Of course there are sound effects which add to this. Ali Taie’s sound design gives us everything from atmospheric folk music to connote Kurdish culture and the sound of war planes and machine gun fire.
There’s a dramatic punch to this play which lingers quite a while after you leave the theatre, not least because of statements in the script which relate to much of what’s happening now especially in the US – which Bowers may not have intended when he wrote it. Either way there were quite a few hollow chuckles from the audience on press night.
Safe Haven is a sobering narrative but it ends, thank goodness, with a moment of hope.
SAFE HAVEN by Chris Bowers, Directed by Mark Giesser
Arcola Theatre, Studio 2
14 January – 7 February 2026
BOX OFFICE https://www.arcolatheatre.com/event/safe-haven/
CAST: Eugenie Bouda as Najat, Beth Burrows as Catherine, Stephen Cavanagh as Brett/Reporter, Mazlum Gul as Dlawer/Al-Tikriti, Richard Lynson as Clive, and Lisa Zahra as Anne/Zeyra.
Photography: Ikin Yum
