Earlier this year Ali Nobil Ahmad reported on the Keeping Cultures conference at Museum in Docklands about museum’s engagement with refugee communities. Here he reviews a new play which makes use of testimonials and ponders the value of campaigning theatre.
Few issues of public concern have been subjected to quite the level of systematic misrepresentation in recent years as the question of asylum and immigration. Unstated, a new verbatim play written by Fin Kennedy and directed by Topher Cambell, seeks to address this through the medium of campaign theatre.
The script is a product of collaboration between the Red Room theatre company and the TUC, along with various other civil society agencies and refugee bodies, as is made clear in the publicity and the design of the play itself. The play makes extensive use of documentary material – above all, interviews with refugees and asylum seekers, activists and commentators, video clips of which are projected from screens and read verbatim by actors.
These testimonies also form the basis of several fictionalised scenes spliced into and around the bulk of the action in what is a highly syncretic dramaturgical experiment that draws upon a multiplicity of contemporary performance techniques: documentary, journalistic, verbatim and promenade genres are all melded here in an ambitious spectacl. It can claim, with some justification, to function as an interactive multi-media art installation.
The venue itself has been transformed into a removal centre, complete with an oppressive, prison-like cage in which most of the action takes place, and an airport waiting room from which we witness failed asylum seekers being deported.
The evening begins promisingly, with the audience subjected to an unnerving surveillance regime by actors playing immigration officials and security staff. The frisking, recording of bio-data, barking of orders and issuing of ID cards create at atmosphere of genuine unease, as does being herded around like cattle in the gloom of the playhouse to the menacing growl of underground trains. A cleverly staged opening scene sets the tone for what promises to be a gripping evening.
High up from a balcony, a smarmy New Labour immigration minister delivers a clinical PowerPoint presentation laying out statistics and removal objectives in sanitised management-speak, his callous discourse juxtaposed with the screams of a pregnant woman being forcibly removed in the airport down below.
Making its timely argument from here on to a largely liberal and potentially sympathetic audience should be like shooting fish in a barrel. And yet somehow, having done all the hard work. Unstated ends up firing way wide of the mark, abdicating its grip on our attention through an ill-advised strategy that combines eclecticism of form and an overly ambitious approach to content. Despite the best efforts of the actors, however, all of whom put in useful performances, the subject matter is too wide ranging and variegated for the argument to successfully resonate.
The eschewal of character, narrative or even recurring scenarios leaves the audience cold. In a desperate attempt to make us care, melodrama is tossed into the mix at the end, with laughably bad results.
What, then, we might well ask, can possibly be the value of campaign theatre?
Well, potentially, quite a lot. For all its disposable bathwater, Unstated is a baby of considerable importance. As a genuinely collaborative effort between artists and activists to stimulate discussion of asylum policy through politically driven art, it has relatively few (if any) antecedents and marks an important step in what is surely the right direction given the failure of the art and theatre establishment to tackle the issues it raises.
Unstated is an experimental work staged with intent, its flashes of brilliance include genuine innovation - the interactive engagement between actors and the voices on screen, for example, are highly effective.
With better co-ordination, formal discipline and realistic ambitions, it may have fulfilled its promise to deliver both information and drama (instead of failing to do either). Without diluting criticism of its shortcomings, we ought to get behind this play and push – that means encouraging others to see it and debate its strengths and weaknesses, so that a more effective model of campaign theatre might be developed on the shoulders of this example – one that states (rather than overstates) the untold realities of our barbaric asylum system.
Keeping Cultures - Museums and Refugees Conference (13-14 March, 2008) Museum in Docklands - A report by Ali Nobil Ahmad
Museum of London Docklands, No. 1 Warehouse, West India Quay, Hertsmere Road, London, E14 4AL, England
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Closed: 24-26 December
