Young TV actress and household celebrity Chloe Collins has quit the TV show that made her name and is making her stage debut in an offbeat production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. Directed by a New York wunderkind fresh from a major Broadway success and produced by an award-winning theatre company, the stakes are high not just for Chloe. The fact that she can't even seem to learn her lines doesn't exactly help. When she suffers a personal tragedy a week before opening night, the mounting media attention surrounding the project intensifies. Chloe has a lot to prove to a lot of people, right in the glare of the public eye.
Queens of Syria tells the story of sixty women from Syria, all forced into exile in Jordan, who came together in Autumn 2013 to create and perform their own version of the Trojan Women, the timeless Ancient Greek tragedy all about the plight of women in war. What followed was an extraordinary moment of cross-cultural contact across millennia, in which women born in 20th century Syria found a blazingly vivid mirror of their own experiences in the stories of a queen, princesses and ordinary women like them, uprooted, enslaved,and bereaved by the Trojan War. The group have six weeks until they are to perform to an audience of hundreds. Not one of them has acted before.
At their old farmhouse on Dartmoor, a family gathers at their matriarch's deathbed to celebrate her last birthday. She has controlled the men in her family for decades, but long-buried secrets and resentments now come to the surface.