While some plays close when the run ends, others simply refuse to relinquish their hold on their creators. Such is the case for Rouvan Silogix, co-creator and performer in The Caged Bird Sings. The two years since the production’s memorable debut at the Aga Khan Museum Courtyard have felt less like a break than the continuation of a conversation that started nearly 800 years ago and built to a fever pitch in the leadup to 2024.
And now The Caged Bird Sings has returned. This radical re-imagining of Rumi’s Masnavi, a six-volume collection of over 25,000 verses containing parables and stories derived from the Quran and Islamic traditions, is playing at Tarragon Theatre’s Extraspace until June 21, 2026. Created by Silogix alongside Rafeh Mahmud (who is also the director) and Ahad Lakhani, the production follows three prisoners: two star-crossed lovers and scientists named Rumi and Jin (Mikaela Lily Davies and Navtej Sandhu, respectively), and Sal (Silogix), a mysterious vagrant. Sharing a cell, they reckon with their pasts and the ghosts and demons they have carried with them. The piece examines the prisons we are placed into, the ones we build for ourselves, and whether we can truly escape any of them.
For Silogix, the decision to revisit the work was inevitable. “Surprisingly or (shockingly), Rumi’s 800-year old work is more resonant now than ever,” he observes, because “our world feels more divided, more broken, and more lost and materially consumed than ever.” The questions Rumi asks— about where we come from, why we love, and what makes us human—are the kind that simply do not resolve, no matter how much time passes. Silogix draws a straight line from Rumi’s mysticism to contemporary physics, noting that explorations of the quantum world, from single-electron theory to quantum loop gravity, keep circling back to the same essential mysteries that Rumi was probing centuries ago. “Rumi isn’t one to provide easy answers: indeed, there aren’t any. But it’s always amazing looking at the questions in the way he asks them,” he notes.
Returning to a living source, rather than reviving a fixed text, is the way Silogix talks about the current production. “In many ways, it feels like a whole new show,” he says. The Aga Khan Museum run was always meant as a starting point: “a first attempt at finding where the piece could go.” Since then, the piece has become “sharper, clearer, and perhaps more provocative and inviting than ever”. What has struck him most in revisiting it is Rumi’s restlessness as a thinker: “the endless cleverness, curiosity, and playfulness with which Rumi engages his themes and topics”. When the creative team hits a wall, they go back to the Masnavi itself, and it provides them with new ways forward. (Silogix notes that the production has always framed itself around a meeting point between Plato’s Cave and Rumi’s own conception of the cave—an idea that Rumi himself nods to in the opening prologue of the Masnavi.)
The move to Tarragon’s Extraspace is a big one for a piece that began outdoors. “The idea of a ‘Cage-Within-A-Cage’ has always been very important to us, whether we’re in a museum courtyard or in a blackbox theatre,” Silogix notes. What matters most is the relationship negotiated between the space and the audience, so the production has been reconfigured for a proscenium setup. Being indoors has opened up new possibilities: “We have unique advantages in using lighting and sound to bring out the light and shadow in the play, through design that is much better suited for a professional theatre space.” The Caged Bird Sings is about to tour, and this is the version that will travel.
Silogix doesn’t shy away from the political weight that the work has accumulated in the past two years. He describes our present moment as shaped by division and the rhetoric of a global leader who pursues a “white supremacist agenda” and threatens civilizations and peoples obliteration. He frames Rumi’s work as a counterweight that focuses on connection and shared humanity: “The oppressive forces want to divide us, separate us, pit us against each other—and we must resist those trappings and temptations at every step and turn,” he says. He is not, however, offering a tidy solution: “We don’t see Rumi as a puzzle to be solved, but another lens to view the same questions we have long been asking ourselves.” His hope is simple: that audiences enjoy themselves, and leave with questions about social and self-imposed prisons and the meaning of life – “something that will carry them through a lively and curious conversation at dinner or drinks, after the show”.
As our conversation nears its close, Silogix turns host. He invites us all to come ready for an evening steeped in Sufi mysticism, Eastern philosophy, and theatre that breaks its own form. And to join the cast, at the close of the show, in sitting with the same questions Rumi has been posing for nearly a thousand years, the ones which the production continues to wrestle with, and which he expects we will still be asking “a thousand years from now”.
The Caged Bird Sings, a Tarragon Theatre presentation of a Modern Times and Theatre ARTaud Production, runs at Tarragon Theatre’s Extraspace until June 28, 2026. Tickets are available at tarragontheatre.com.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
