Once We Were Kings

Once We Were Kings (3 ½ stars)

Review by Laura Money

Third Culture Kids presents Once We Were Kings, an intimate series of stories of struggle and disillusion that illuminate the real yearnings of young Muslims.

Beginning with a male and female figure rendering their faces blank by holding up white canvases to cover them. When the lights go down, a multimedia show is projected onto the canvas, projecting western ideas of Muslim identity onto the silent figures.

A young man tells his story of immigration, a young girl smokes and taps her sparkly red heels together, another dreams of the comfort she misses from family. They are angry, loud, soft, kind, jovial and traumatised.

The show is drawn from real stories of young Muslims living in Australia whose stories are often silenced or closeted. They highlight the fact that they don’t fit in either culture, especially a young homosexual man, the ideas that Australians have of them that are wrong but mostly what it is to be a ‘crescent shaped peg in a southern cross shaped hole.’

Once We Were Kings is on at The Blue Room Theatre, Perth from the 12^th – 29^th May 2015