LONDON - 4 September 2006 - 682 words
Greenbelt: Asylum testimony - learning to listen
Rima Devereaux reviews 'Asylum Monologues' at the Greenbelt festival'
Three actors interrupt each other to tell true stories of asylum-seekers in the UK. They speak in monologue, facing the audience. 'Asylum Monologues: Personal Testimonies of Asylum Seekers in the UK', scripted by Sonja Linden and presented by Actors for Refugees and iceandfire, uses the medium of theatre to humanise the issue of asylum and reach out to a wider audience than that involved in and supporting refugee and asylum work.
As the refugees' only listeners, the audience has to decide how to react. Do we believe the testimony? Do we care? Do we know enough about the political situation in their countries to make sense of their disjointed stories? Do we have the tools not to react with prejudice to what they're saying? Do we even want to learn to react in the most appropriate way? Without the audience's full participation, this first-hand account of the UK's asylum system falls on deaf ears.
The play is partly an introduction to the needs of asylum-seekers. The testimony gives an insight into their psychological state and personal circumstances. The extracts from legal documents such as UNHCR guidelines give background information and highlight the discrepancy between human rights law and reality. The actors also use more direct methods to help the audience to get into the shoes of the asylum-seekers. At one point the audience is challenged to imagine themselves as UK citizens arriving in China seeking asylum. You are given a form that needs to be filled out in Chinese within 19 days of arriving. It is pages and pages long but is essential for your case. You don't have a translator or understand how the country works, and you are exhausted and traumatised. Perhaps the voice that grates most on the ear is that of public opinion: we witness statements by politicians from Winston Churchill to Tony Blair on Britain as a land of welcome.
More difficult to hear than anything that has gone before are the stories about the humiliating and degrading treatment that asylum-seekers can receive at British detention centres. We witness people being asked to strip in front of officers of both sexes while jokes are made about them; we witness the officers who try to get asylum-seekers on a plane home even after they know that immigration has just telephoned to say they can stay. Although asylum-seekers are not criminals, they are treated far worse than prisoners. Procedures giving asylum-seekers access to professional help can be ineffectual: we witness social care services translating the silence of psychological trauma into signatures.
The same actors who at the beginning of the play took on the character of an asylum-seeker telling his or her story, abruptly switch roles and become the voice of public opinion. This is an emotional roller coaster ride for the spectator, who is disoriented by the common humanity the actors' humanity, above and beyond the roles revealed beneath the circumstances of each character. Words and definitions are called into question: 'there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant.'
This play is not easy to watch, yet it
is far from being unremittingly bleak. One of the asylum-seekers
whose story is told by the actors at the beginning is a woman
called Nadine Spence. She made an appearance in the play as a
singer, but sat slightly apart from the others, mostly in silence,
occasionally intervening to sing worship songs. These are startling
because they appear incongruous, but they serve to punctuate the
monologues just when they are becoming unbearable. The real communication
in this play is that between Nadine Spence the only actor
not playing a role and the audience. That communication
is a message of hope, founded on the words of her songs, and of
course the fact that she is there to take part in the first place.
This hope allows the audience to go away feeling informed, inspired
and challenged, and not defeated.
© Independent Catholic
News 2006
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