“A story of blockbuster proportions! The Big Lie is an urgent and captivating story, told by a voice the world needs to hear.”  ★★★★ –  EDINBURGH49

“Shaniaz’s storytelling capabilities are intelligent, apt and truly cutting; a welcome break from the more trivial pieces of this year’s Fringe.” ★★★★ – THE LIST

“Shaniaz Hama Ali’s semi-autobiographical play contains all the elements needed for a great story…and like the rest of the fascinating hour that we spend in her company, we applaud her for it.” ★★★★ – BROADWAY BABY

Front Line Club are proud to present The Big Lie, a Edinburgh Fringe success production that is going off Broadway in New York later this year – via a pit stop at Frontline.

In this semi-autobiographical play, Shaniaz is an ambitious associate at Sweden’s leading corporate law firm and is assigned to work with their top client – a global arms manufacturer – to sell arms to Syria. The protagonist, an Iraqi-Kurd and a survivor of Saddam Hussein’s genocide of the Kurdish people, has to consider whether or not to take on the case. Her conscience tussles with her ambition to become one of the firm’s partners, enabling her to join the ruling class.

The Big Lie makes us question our own morality. In her shoes, would we take on this case?

This humorous, gripping play is written by Hama Ali and directed by Oscar Toeman. Shaniaz worked as an associate at a global corporate law firm in Sweden, where she gained first-hand insight into a world that is normally hidden. Shaniaz fictionalised her experiences at the firm in a film screenplay that caught the interest of a Swedish production company. When Shaniaz moved to London, she made it into a one-woman show to bring to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2018.

The show won critical praise in Edinburgh with 4 stars reviews from Broadway Baby, the List and Edinburgh49. It was featured in the Scotsman, listed as one of four must-sees by the Daily Record and was nominated for Amnesty Freedom of Speech Award. 

Shaniaz says of The Big Lie, “As a Muslim refugee I wanted to make a play about the racism I experienced growing up in an all-white, working-class neighbourhood in Sweden and why people vote for the far right, for Brexit and Trump. But mostly, I want to tell the truth about the clients of the corporate law firm that I worked in – the wealthy 1% and their role in all of this.”

During the Q&A we’ll be asking tough questions about the meeting points of politics and theatre in our society – and the relationship between art and activism.

Shaniaz Hama Ali is a Kurdish-Iraqi actress who came as a refugee to Sweden at a very young age. She joined the Swedish Labour Party and became the fiscal spokesperson for the Labour youth. But Shaniaz had a passion for acting that never subsided, she resigned from her job as a legal consultant and moved to London to focus on her acting career. She has since then starred in the short film PRACTICE; performed in the critically acclaimed French TV-series The Bureau (Canal+); and most recently in Red Snake, directed by Caroline Fourest, award winning French journalist, in her feature debut.

Oscar Toeman read English at St, Catharine’s College, Cambridge University, and trained as assistant to Roger Michell, Polly Findlay, Blanche McIntyre, Tim Carroll and Lucy Bailey at institutions including Shakespeare’s Globe, the RSC and the National Theatre. He was Resident Assistant Director at the Finborough Theatre in 2011, long listed for the JMK Award in 2014 and 2015, a National Theatre Staff Director in 2015, Interim Resident Director at the National Theatre Studio in 2016.

Siana Bangura is a writer, producer and community organiser originally from South East London, now working between London and the West Midlands. Her work primarily focuses on the intersection between race, class and gender, exploring issues such as deaths in custody in the UK, police brutality, and gentrification. Siana is the founder and former editor of Black British Feminist platform, No Fly on the WALL and most recently she was Campaigns & Communications Officer for an environmental charity in Birmingham, focusing on mobilising young people to take action in their local communities. Siana’s past contributions as a producer in theatre include ‘Fierce’ (Camden People’s Theatre), ‘Othello’ (English Touring Theatre), and she is currently an artist in residence at The Birmingham Rep. Siana is an alumnus of China Plate Theatre’s The Optimists, Belgrade Theatre’s Critical Mass, and is currently commissioned to write three plays of her own.

Saudi Arabia remains the UK’s most important arms client, and the government has granted export licences for more than £3.3bn of aircraft, munitions and other equipment. The British government has stated the Saudis must conduct an investigation into allegations of humanitarian crimes. But many are urging that Saudi Arabia’s investigation of its own alleged humanitarian violations is not an adequate inquiry.

At the same time, the US has become more involved in the conflict, including a failed commando raid that caused the deaths of multiple civilians and a U.S. service member.

Is enough consideration of humanitarian contexts being taken in arms export licensing and counter-terrorism? With a judicial review aiming to halt UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia beginning in February, we will discuss the role of foreign powers in Yemen’s civil conflict.

Chaired by Yemeni/ British journalist and filmmaker Nawal al-Maghafi. Nawal’s work has featured on Channel 4, BBC Newsnight, BBC World and BBC Arabic, amongst others.

Speakers (full panel announced soon)

David Wearing has just completed his doctoral thesis on Britain’s relationship with the Gulf Arab monarchies. He teaches international relations and Middle East politics at SOAS, and has contributed articles for The Guardian, CNN and the New Statesman. He sits on the steering committee of Campaign Against Arms Trade, and is the author of their recent report: “A Shameful Relationship: UK Complicity in Saudi State Violence”.

Iona Craig is a British-Irish independent journalist and Orwell Fellow. She was previously based in Sana’a from 2010 to 2015 as Yemen correspondent for The Times. Since Yemen’s civil war began Iona has been the only international journalist to repeatedly cross the front lines to report on both sides of the conflict, travelling over 3,000 miles across the country since March 2015 to file reports for TV, radio and print. During her time in Yemen Iona has reported for over 30 publications and broadcasters worldwide including most recently The Intercept, Harper’s, IRIN and RTÉ radio.

Rasha Mohamed is Amnesty International’s Yemen researcher. She has gone on numerous research missions to Yemen since the armed conflict erupted in March 2015. Her focus has been primarily the range of human rights violations and international humanitarian law (“laws of war”) by all sides to the conflict. For the Saudi Arabia-led coalition, this has included documenting numerous unlawful airstrikes which have killed and injured civilians, and the use of internationally banned weapons. Her research formed the basis of Amnesty International’s intervention in a current UK High Court Judicial Review of the UK government’s arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.

Iain Overton

By Will Worley

On Wednesday 22 April 2015, the Frontline Club welcomed investigative journalist and director of policy and investigations at UK charity Action on Armed Violence, Iain Overton for a discussion on his latest book, Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of the Gun. The event was chaired by ANC former politician and author Andrew Feinstein, who has written extensively on the global arms trade.

Overton began by reading an extract from Gun Baby Gun, describing the aftermath of a brutal shooting in Brazil. Soon after witnessing this event, he visited a basement gun repository in Sao Paulo, where he found “thousands and thousands of guns across the walls, a bit like a horrific library, where every sort of gun seemed to have a background story.”

This “basement of horrors” led Overton to realise that every single gun present “told this story of disconnected realities.”

The ignorance of arms manufacturers and dealers as to the eventual fate of their guns “made me think how the gun is separated in all of its different segments.”

Overton elaborated on the many aspects of the gun covered by his book: “its dead, its wounded, the suicidal, the killers, the criminals, the police, the military, civilians, hunters, traders, smugglers, lobbyists, manufacturers.” The relationship between gender and the cult of the gun is even explored in a chapter aptly titled ‘Sex Pistols.’

“Every single isolated group around the gun is seen through my eyes as part of a whole.”

Guns are the biggest killer in war – 90% of deaths during conflict are a result of guns. They are also the biggest killer in armed violence – 60% of all violent deaths are by the gun. In the USA, 20,000 people commit suicide every year with a gun. Although the National Rifle Association (NRA) claims that gun deaths in the US have fallen significantly, this is down to significant advancements in trauma care, largely developed as a result of the experiences of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is not often taken into account is the colossal rise in the numbers of those wounded by guns annually.

The ubiquity of guns in some parts of the world and the resulting violence go largely unreported internationally, despite huge numbers of casualties. Central America is a particular case in point, as El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico witness huge levels of violence as a result of the ongoing US-led ‘war on drugs’.

Overton also pointed out that many Central American cartel members have their guns made to order north of the border in the United States.

Great night at the @frontlineclub w/ @iainoverton & @andrewfeinstein on people’s relationships people with guns – pic.twitter.com/f1UyB2iwwW”

— Jenny Marc (@JennyLMarc) April 22, 2015

In many instances of violence globally, the presence of a gun has become an assumption, rather than a newsworthy element of the story. “The gun has just become a background noise in violence.”

Overton went on to highlight the transformative power of the gun. There is a “very physical transformation that occurs in a man when he picks up a gun.” Being in possession of a gun emboldens people to the point of recklessness, he added.

“It transforms power, it transforms situations. And for the people who are in the midst of despair, it doesn’t take a lot to pick up a gun and end your life.”

“I don’t think the book is anti-gun,” concluded Overton, as the discussion drew to a close. “If someone has their life dictated by going out hunting at the weekend, they see the gun as purely a tool to take down a deer.”

There are 12 billion bullets produced every year – almost two bullets for every person on the planet. Guns kill as many as 500,000 people every year. Tearing lives apart, they impact not only the dead, the wounded, the suicidal and the mourning, but have far-reaching effects on society and communities.

In a hard-hitting exploration, award-winning investigative journalist Iain Overton journeyed to over 25 countries, from South Africa to Iceland, Honduras to Cambodia, to try and understand the true impact of gun crime.

From porn starlets who appear as snipers in XXX films, Zionist anti-terror gun trainers, El Salvadoran gangland killers and South African doctors soaked in the blood of gunshot victims, Overton tells the harrowing and sobering stories of lives directly affected by guns.

Iain Overton will be joining us in conversation with writer and author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade, Andrew Feinstein, to discuss what he has learnt about the impact of gun crime, the relationships we have with guns and the place they occupy in every day life.

Iain Overton is Director of Investigations at the London-based charity Action on Armed Violence and an investigative journalist who has worked in over eighty countries around the world. Reporting from the killing zones of Colombia, Iraq and Somalia, he has made films for the BBC, ITN and Al Jazeera, as well as working with The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times. He was founding editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and is author of Gun Baby Gun.