‘Planting seeds of peace’: Bosnian war stories are brought to the stage

Susan Moffat and Aida Haughton explain how their play My Thousand Year Old Land was given a universal humanity by using raw, real-life testimony

Three women - Pravda (meaning justice"), Istina (truth"), and Nada (hope") - sit around a table, grinding coffee and telling stories. Around them on stage are men's boots, belts and a hat. The men are no longer here but killed in war.

It's what writer and director Susan Moffat calls the presence of absence". In the play My Thousand Year Old Land (A Song for BiH), which Moffat wrote alongside Bosnian war survivor Aida Haughton, we follow three women whose lives are changed by the deaths of their communities' men in the 1990s conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They find themselves taking on the typically male roles in the family, from tilling the fields to feeding cockerels.