Dispatches from the Vaults #2

"I didn’t think you all look the same"

I saw Tim Foley's Astronauts of Hartlepool at the end of a long weekend and truth be told, I was just too tired to enjoy it properly. I'd love to read it and see it again, and then probably read it again, to get a fuller appreciation of how complex its hour. Layers upon layers are built up by Foley in his political sci-fi epic (Battlestar Galactica (the remake) as done by BBC3) in which Sophie Steer's Aidan encounters multiple versions of Rakhee Thakrar's dimension-hopping Nadia. They always meet in Hartlepool but all is not what it seems, even for the Brexit-voting North-East and Foley intelligently works in a deep critique of where we've let our country get to as well as keeping the tone admirably light. I just need to be less tired so I can concentrate more, sorry y'all.

Borderland/Calais was formulated as a response to not just the closure of the Calais refugee camps but also the media coverage thereof, using verbatim theatre techniques to give voice to those disenfranchised, dehumanised, demonised even by being part of what could be called one of the great humanitarian crises of the 21st Century. Over the week of the run, the programme featured a range of guest performers, from Rudi Dharmalingam, Lucy Ellinson and Yusra Warsama, to Denise Gough and Vera Chok who I saw deliver Borderland, written by Prasanna Puwanarajah and Stephanie Street, and Inua Ellam who performed Calais, woven from the Twitter Feeds of the Help Refugees and the Refugee Info Bus by Maddy Costa.

I found Borderline to be the more effective of the two, a distillation of hard statistics and human realities into a brutally affecting report of what feels like something close to the truth of what trying to live on the camp might have been like. As ever, tales of the incredibly indomitable human spirit sit alongside the most appalling horror stories and short and sharp as it was, Gough and Chok pierced the heart. Calais has no less honourable intentions behind it but its reportage of the last hours of the camp from the Twitter feeds of those there was a real challenge, pummeling the audience emotionally but not offering much by way of theatrical compensation.

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