Larisa Faber brings grief, humour, and Romanian history to the stage in The Land We Shared.

The Land We Shared starts with a bag full of clothes. The symbolism and story behind that bag is exactly what the play develops over the course of its showcase. It is echoed from the moment you walk in: the first thing you see is simply some ropes and white sheets suspended in the background of the stage. These sheets evolve and are drawn into a "fever dream-like" interplay with lighting, continuously bringing forward the story of three characters, the grandmother, the father, and little L, through their own relationship with one another and the shifting light around them.

Faber began creating the play from an important personal moment. Her Romanian grandmother had passed away, and when looking through her things after the burial, she found a bag of clothes with a note: these were the garments she had wished to be buried in. Too late to honour that request, Faber found another way, by telling her grandmother’s story through theatre. She wants to honour the land where she comes from while, through a retelling of her grandmother’s life, also looking inward to understand who she is. “It is a story about the past, but also the present and future,” says dramaturge Shamira Turner.

Even though the story is rooted in what it means to be Romanian, it is ultimately about making sense of who you are, Turner explains. Family, migration, identity, grief, loss, these are universal themes. “You do not need to know anything about Romania to understand this play,” she says.

It is precisely because of these weighty themes that the play needs to be anchored in humour and joy, the actors explain. Each of them, having roots in Eastern Europe, connected deeply with the culture being portrayed, but it goes beyond personal background. “I love the irony you can find in the play. I love when you can laugh about something serious,” says Ruslana Khazipova, who plays the grandmother. Khazipova, who is Ukrainian, identifies strongly with the story through her own family’s experience within the Soviet Union.

One thing all three actors share is that they grew up with cabbages. Ukrainian, Croatian-American, and Romanian, each comes from a tradition where the vegetable is central. Ovidiu Mihăița, who plays the father and experienced the Romanian revolution as a child, notes that even though the dish takes different forms across their respective cultures, “it’s an Ottoman dish, but things melted during history and now it is a thing in our countries to eat Islamic dishes for Christian holidays,” he says jokingly. 

Mihăița also shared a quieter anecdote. During the Chernobyl disaster, he was fortunate enough to stay indoors, the vegetables outside, however, were not so lucky, growing far larger than expected. “No one went out for a week,” he recalled.

Woven through the irony and humour, music plays an equally important role. A drum kit and double bass move around the stage, available to the characters as they advance this story of unfinished business.

Little L, played by Kristin Winters, is Larisa’s alter ego. “It is always interesting to play a character that is still alive, let alone in the room,” she says. At the heart of it is a story of love between a grandmother and granddaughter, and more broadly, what we receive from our families. The father-daughter relationship will resonate with many too: the figure in your life is not what you want them to be, and only as you get older do you begin to understand why, particularly set against the backdrop of the Romanian revolution and its aftermath, Winters explains.

“Many people have no idea what happened in Romania, some might have a vague idea about the eighties and nineties, or it’s really stereotyped. I really hope that whether it’s your story and you’ve lived it, or you don’t know anything about it, you will still get into the play and connect with it. That was the first goal when writing it,” explains Turner.

“Larisa has written it at moments with complete absurdity, irony, and humour — it’s full of humour — and that allows you to hear the story much better,” says Winters. “It is easier to tell a hard story through laughter than through suffering,” adds Khazipova. “Joy is sometimes stronger and more convincing; you trust the story more, and you believe the humanity in it.” She concludes with a line from her character that perhaps says it all: “To joke is to disarm.”

The Land We Shared, by Larisa Faber, staged from 7 to 19 May at the Théâtre des Capucins