CRY FOR ME
Project
Cry for me
First conceived in 2022-23, CRY FOR ME was selected for the Calm Down, Dear 2023 feminist theatre festival, curated by RashDash, and hosted by Camden People’s Theatre in London.
POMOC, a grassroots organization fighting for justice, dignity and power for Eastern European communities, supported CRY FOR ME from the very beginning with a seed commission, marketing and, crucially, connection to community organizing spaces, blurring the line between art and real world, which is what allows CRY FOR ME to be a real community project.
After a sold out work-in-progress sharing, CRY FOR ME had a run at Applecart in East Ham in autumn 2023. Counterpoint Arts, a leading national organization in the field of arts, migration and social change, contributed financially towards this second stage of development. Interactive Soup, a social event, dinner, and miniature funding platform all-in-one, also contributed towards subsidising 10 tickets per performance for migrant workers, so that we could offer tickets discounted to £3 instead of the full amount.
CRY FOR ME returned to Camden People’s Theatre for a sold-out run in spring 2024, where they raised £750 for Workers for a Free Palestine.
The show had its first national touring commission at the Ark in Margate in autumn 2024.
In addition to the organisations listed above, CRY FOR ME has received support from cultural and community organisations like Projekt Europa, Baron’s Court Theatre and SPILL Think Tank, Ipswich, and enjoys a strong and committed fanbase of migrant and British audiences.
In 2025, we were awarded POMOC’s first artist-community organiser residency, Collective Futures, that aims to engage Romanian and Eastern European migrants in the borough of Brent in London.
We have teamed up with documentary filmmaker Al Johnstone (Beyond Eden) to make a CRY FOR ME documentary.
CRY FOR ME is a dystopian cabaret about migrant labour created by Andreea Tudose and iulia isar.
Set in a not too implausible future where crying is just one more type of labour that can be outsourced to a cheap migrant workforce, CRY FOR ME draws on Romanian folk traditions of wailing for the dead and interviews with migrant workers living in the UK.
Through comedy and satire, it charts the rise of the business CRY FOR ME Ltd.
When all Romanians leave Romania in search of work, two babe bocitoare (bah-beh bow-chi-twa-reh)- professional wailers for the dead from Romania- decide to move to London in search of clients. However, to their great surprise, no one has time to die in London because everyone is too busy working.
And so they retrain and learn to cry for the living, making a killing.
The format of the show is part cabaret, part business presentation through the medium of clown. The process for each CRY FOR ME iteration involves interviews and workshops with migrant workers, where they get to create and direct their own stories of work, and the show is based on these. We use this fictitious labour to talk about very real working conditions and experiences.
CRY FOR ME is a tragicomic invitation to cry for ourselves, for the choiceless choices many of us have to make and live with, to mourn the versions of ourselves that we will not get to become. Our work is to reframe the ‘personal’ difficulties, losses and grief of our migrations as communal: collateral damage in a vampiric economic system that ultimately casts us all as the living dead.
More recent explorations
With iulia on parental leave, CRY FOR ME is enjoying a new life as an ambulatory solo show. As it discovers its feet, it is travelling across London and touring nationally, engaging communities of Romanian, Eastern European and other migrant workers across the country.
CRY FOR ME performances & workshops aim to bring people together to share, reflect, play and imagine a different world, a different version of themselves (and hold space for the grief that comes with that) as a way of creating community every night through every gathering.