Since it was first published in 1897, The Kurds has rarely been performed – and then, only during times and under circumstances when its left-wing ideology did not prove an impediment. Petros, Smaragda, Mrs Stavroplena, Anneta and Vasos are thus approaching 130 years of near invisibility. They are absent, like the play’s exiled Armenian couple, who are present only through the accounts of the characters and the banging of their trunks. The Kurds is a bold theatrical statement about the powerless people of the world, whose lives do not allow for heroic gestures; who “are not constitutionally suited to rebellion, however attracted they are by the theory”, as the main character, Petros, observes. But whose insistence on claiming a role different from that assigned to them by history means that the possibility of some kind of overthrow always lies dormant.