Showing @ Traverse, Edinburgh until Sat 8 Jun
Few issues in British politics are as polarising as immigration; as the EU debate rages on hardly a day goes by without some tabloid or another lamenting that ‘scrounging’ refugees have brought our ‘soft-touch’ nation to its knees. Directed by Catrin Evans, AJ Taudevin’s stark and bold new work aims to highlight the difficulties encountered in the somewhat dehumanising process of seeking asylum.
Coming as part of Refugee Week Scotland, the play is about a young girl called Star (Shvorne Marks) who has fled with her mother from some unspecific region in Africa to an indeterminate tenement in Glasgow. Being forced to act as interpreter between her Mama (Joy Elias-Rilwan) and social worker Sarah Jane (Pauline Knowles), Star begins to construct her own fantastical world in order to seek sanctuary from the onerous process of applying for asylum.
Having worked for the past six years with asylum seekers and refugees, Taudevin’s play feels lived-in and realistic. The mildewed walls of the set conjure the dank smell of Star’s temporary home, while the dynamic between Mama and Sarah Jane as they try to cross that insuperable language barrier is something clearly gleaned from experience. A clumsy audio-track used at points is slightly jarring but not enough to sully this impassioned supplication. The lyricism of the dialogue is enchantingly delivered by Marks; the vicissitudes of Star’s mental development are revealed through sentences which grow from broken English to a pre-teen parlance, replete with “bezzies” and various expletives. Yet though the play’s focus is the inhumanity of the asylum seeking process, there are plenty of references to the injustices of our own welfare system. The recent adoption of the bedroom tax is just one reminder that while Star’s world may be half fantasy, the subject matter is not.