Adapted for the stage from Miranda Gold's first novel, Starlings reaches back through three generations to illuminate the visceral yet intangible experience of inherited memory. This one-woman play is written and performed by Miranda Gold and directed by Jacob Wolstencroft.

About the Play

Sally leaves London hoping to reconnect with her brother, Steven, who moved away four years ago in an effort to free himself from their shared history. Fractured family stories of surviving the Holocaust and fleeing Nazi occupied Vienna alongside first-hand experience of their mother's desperate physical and emotional fragility loom over the siblings, whose divergent ways of navigating their inheritance have made them strangers to one another. The pulse of the ghosts Sally carries continues to beat as an undercurrent that will not recede, threatening to eclipse the present.

When the reunion she imagines crumbles, she is compelled to sift through a store of hand-me-down memories and silenced voices to uncover how their bond broke and ind her way closer to Steven. In doing so, she unwittingly reconciles her own relationship to what haunts her.

Through Sally, the unprocessed past is not simply remembered but re-embodied as scenes blur the borders between reality, memory, imagination and dreamscape. A tapestry of persecution, survival, and exile reveals how the legacy of the Holocaust ricochets in our own moment. Where this legacy pushes against the limits of language, the play interweaves traditional storytelling, recurrent poetic images and insistent rhythms alongside the integration of live music and video collage to create a felt sense of 'the unspeakable', stimulating the mind and engaging the heart.

Starlings brings the archetype of the outsider, the fragility of the masks we adopt for survival, and the meaning of home into focus. It unsettles the boundaries between the personal and the collective, between memory and lived experience, safety and freedom. The hybrid presentation of storytelling, poetry, theatre, music and video mirrors the play's challenge to the illusion of binary oppositions, opening a more nuanced, expansive dialogue across cultures and generations. Holding space for the shadows and silences, the play recognises that healing is not necessarily about finding answers but about stripping away the comfort of reductive identification and the courage to ask new questions.

Why now?

Sally's story foregrounds her experience as a third generation refugee. Her personal struggle echoes historical patterns of trauma embedded in cultures torn apart by conflict and converses with the global struggle playing out now. The play speaks most immediately to the Israel-Hamas war and the aftermath of displaced people attempting to rebuild their lives. It also finds a deep resonance with the crisis in Ukraine and Russia. These are cycles that have played out across time and space and the resonance of this play continues to cycle. As fascist ideologies rise, Starlings reminds its audiences of how lethal prejudice can be. In shining a light on the relationship between individual identity and collective narratives, the play explores how we might transcend the grip of intergenerational trauma to break these patterns.

Excerpts from Starlings

Watch excerpts from Starlings the play, starring Miranda Gold and directed by Jacob Wolstencroft.