Review: The Beekeeper of Aleppo is the wrong show at the right time

With productions planned months – if not years – in advance, theatre can take a while to pick up on world events and the public mood. The nationwide tour of The Beekeeper of Aleppo has begun as bombs rain down on the Middle East, and the play’s message of the pointlessness of war has seldom had greater resonance.

Anthony Almeida’s Nottingham Playhouse production is well-timed, but it is a conscientious rather than especially inspiring retelling of Christy Lefteri’s much-loved novel about a family – headed by Adam Sina and Farah Saffari – fleeing war-torn Syria and their eventful journey across Europe to reach sanctuary in England.

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Sina and Saffari are very good and accomplished actors and acquit themselves well, but the youngsters – and it is vitally important in a piece like this that the audience are made to care about them – deliver strangely flat performances. That is my main hesitation about a show that I wanted very much to like.

It is not as powerful as The Boy With Two Hearts, Phil Porter’s stage adaptation of Hamed and Hessam Amiri’s book that was staged at the National Theatre in 2022, but Nesrin Alrefaai and Matthew Spangler’s script still makes the point very eloquently that we cannot in this country complain about refugees when we are involved so heavily in creating them. This is flawed but well-intentioned theatre.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo is touring until mid-June, with venues including Bath, Dublin, Blackpool and Brighton. Full details here