Words are very important in a land with no flag, with a name that is not accepted. Words must represent. They must be traded against jewels, even in the Kingdom of Death where books are banned: there must be a change, an exchange, "there must be another way".

The Journey is a real one, the journey of refugees, the tortured, the persecuted, across Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Turkey, Greece to France and then across the Channel to break free, running chaotically onto a motorway. It is a journey of escape, but a journey that runs headlong into division, into the division of the heart and future, into the path of the oncoming break and shatter of past with present, place with feelings.

The Journey is a Story - a wonders-full collage of traditional tales and the circumstances of their telling. Simple and awful moments of need and fear open into a symbolic landscape, a place of violence where a skull demanding deaths is shattered, only for every fragment to demand as many deaths again for each speck of its dust - "there must be another way".

Xanthe Graham's measured and sure performance, dressed in fire, speaking like a woman spitting jewels, is matched by Zirak Hamad's sensitive music and vibrant interventions - the weave of un-translated Kurdish lyrics and English storytelling creates a helpful distance, a reserve through which the audience can enter the land of symbols. At the end the two performers exit, separately, one through the stage, the other through the audience - there is no real reconciliation to match the symbolic one. This dissonance is one of integrity, of real lives, of a place, of a mother's corpse in a cave, four years old, with a flowing breast, suckling a prince of Death - there must be another way.

As these stories unfold, literally in a roll of paper and text, they map a route of distance in representation, in having to stand in for land. A people still confronted with the tests and labours of three chambers - tests and labours still to come.

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