The Beekeeper of Aleppo
Nottingham Playhouse & UK Tour

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Some projects stay with you. The Beekeeper of Aleppo is one of them. The story of a Syrian beekeeper and his wife, their world torn apart by war, their long journey westward. It is not easy material, and it was never meant to be.

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​Working closely with director Anthony Almeida and set designer Ruby Pugh, we developed a visual world that draws on the work of Syrian artist Vian K Hussein alongside documentary material from the Aleppo Media Centre — moving between raw archival fragments, painterly abstraction, and a stark architectural minimalism. Ruby Pugh's set became a landscape of memory as much as place: surfaces for light, thresholds between past and present, screens that dissolve when the story demands it and hold firm when it does not.

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What stayed with us most was how quietly the video needed to work, present throughout, but never louder than the human story at the centre of it.

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Creative Team

Director: Anthony Almeida
Set & Costume Designer: Ruby Pugh
Lighting Designer: Ben Ormerod
Sound Designer: Tingying Dong
Video Designer: Zsolt Balogh for Palma Studio
Composer: Elaha Soroor
Movement Director: Kane Husbands
Casting Directors: Lucy Jenkins & Sooki McShane for Jenkins McShane Casting
Dialect Coaches: Nadia Gattan & Louise Jones
Voice Coach: Marianne Samuels
Cultural Consultant: Nesrin Alrefaai