Helping Refugees Help Themselves: The Play Really is the Thing!
New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast
04/03/25
•40m
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Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king,” when the troubled Prince stages a play to catch a murderer. The underlying point of the play-in-the-play is that drama is an incredibly powerful force for storytelling and much else.
Fast forward to the 21st century for an amazing example of that Shakespearean wisdom. Two incredibly creative British filmmakers created something called The Trojan Women Project to use drama to help refugees from wars in the Middle East and Ukraine cope with their trauma. The idea is elegant in its simplicity: combine the wisdom and words of Euripides’ play with the tragic lived experiences of people fleeing war and destruction, as therapy for them and as a learning tool for audiences who are offered unique insight into what war is really like.
Charlotte Eagar and William Stirling have worked on this project for more than a decade. The Tällberg Foundation first met them in 2014 when they brought a dozen Syrian refugee cast members to one of our workshops. We witnessed an absolutely amazing performance of The Trojan Women laden with a depth of tragedy that even the greatest actors would be challenged to produce—because for the Syrians, it was their lives, not their lines they were sharing.
Listen as Charlotte and William describe how they tap into the real power of the play, and how it can transform refugees as well as audiences.
Previous Episode
Congo’s Unending Tragedy
March 27, 2025
•37m
With its unlimited natural resources and huge agricultural potential capacity, the Democratic Republic of Congo should be a paradise—but unfortunately, it’s not. Instead, it’s been wracked by war, bad government, corruption, tribal and ethnic enmities, neighbors who are serially tempted to intervene, and Great Powers who seem to think that it's time for a second age of colonialism.
Recently, well-armed militias, accompanied by the Rwandan military, have seized key provinces in the country's mineral-rich east. They're threatening to continue their offensive with an ever-changing mix of tribal, political, and economic justifications thatmay be pointing towards violent regime change in Kinshasa.
Why should we care? Obviously, because the human tragedies that define such wars should not be happening in the 21st century. But, beyond that, the Congo conflict is a dangerous microcosm of our time: international borders no longer sacrosanct; 19th-century-style natural resource grabs for 21st-century rare earth minerals; Great Power rivalries; the potential for a larger regional conflict if full-blown civil war breaks out across Africa’s second largest country.
Michela Wrong is a journalist and an author who knows Rwanda, Congo, and the Great Lakes region as well as anyone. Her recent article in Foreign Affairs, “How Far Will Rwanda Go in Congo?” provides some of the backstory to this New Thinking for a New World conversation about the huge dangers of yet another conflict in Congo.
Will Congo ever find peace? Tell us what you think and comment here.
Next Episode
Best New Thinking: Doctor, Doctor Give Me the News
April 10, 2025
•34m
Healthcare is intensely personal. Even when national statistics show improvement—which has been the case for most countries over recent decades—what matters is whether my baby in rural Uganda is having trouble breathing or whether my aging father in New York who went into the hospital with a broken hip will now die from the MERS he contracted there or whether why my wife in Buenos Aries can access the drugs she needs to survive cancer.
In our hi-tech age, it seems like much of what ails us and our loved ones should be erasable using innovative technology.
Dr. Kristian Olson agrees. He's an American internist and pediatrician, based at Harvard, who practices globally, as well as a designer who helped create the Center for Affordable Medical Technology. CAMTech designs solutions—high-tech and not-so-high-tech—that produce better, affordable health outcomes.
Dr. Olson is also a winner of the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize recognized by the jury for his unwavering commitment to transforming healthcare especially in low and middle-income countries through human-centered design, pioneering solutions that improve lives across diverse communities.
Tell us what you think: Can smart use of technology make us—all of us—healthier?
This episode was originally published on November 27, 2024.
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