You're Always With Me

Filiz Ozcan directs the European Premiere of Azerbaijani and Soviet writer Ilyas Afandiyev’s playYou’re Always With Me - translated by Sanan Ailev at The Lost Theatre. This is the first English language production of the play.

A bittersweet romance, a pair, both lonely in their own ways, find themselves drawn to each other. As they form a bond that defies conventions, their relationship makes us ask whether love holds the answer to loneliness…

Afandiyev's You Are Always With Me caused a stir with its thinly disguised observations on class in Soviet society when first staged in Soviet-era Azerbaijan in 1964. Its resonances are still as powerful and relevant today, in its gentle examination of how love naturally takes different forms in the different stages of our lives, and the ways in which the world seeks to impose and mould those loves. Afandiyev leaves us with the confidence that the individual will always prevail in the face of society's hypocrisy and control.