Unstated: Stories of Refuge

Devised & Directed by Topher Campbell
Written by Fin Kennedy

July 2nd 2008 - July 12th 2008

Show starts: 7.30pm (3pm Saturday matinees)
Running time: 90 mins

You have no home and no money. Those you love were violently wrenched from you. Who do you turn to? What do you turn into?

UNSTATED is a powerful story based on the true testimonies of the men and women who seek refuge in the UK. Sometimes smuggled, sometimes forced from their own land; washed up on the tide of British Society, how welcome are they?

Click here to see Asfin Azizian tell his story...

Topher Campbell’s compelling production fuses an explosive mix of film and live action. Written by Fin Kennedy (John Whiting Award) from filmed interviews and designed by international artist Roney Fraser-Munroe, the Red Room’s UNSTATED exposes how we treat some of societies most vulnerable.

Part performance, part installation, UNSTATED is an interactive show presented in a promenade space with the venue being turned into a ‘removal centre’.

UNSTATED is a morality play of our times that continues the RED ROOM practice of creating potent work to inspire audiences who question the changing world.

The RED ROOM’S credits include Hoxton Story, Stitching (Time Out Best Off West End Production) & Bogus Woman (Best Fringe Performance MEN).

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2 course meal at Tito's Peruvian Restaurant (by London Bridge Station) + ticket to see the show

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Main Course: Escabeche de pescado or Aji de gallina or Ronda vegetariana
Dessert: Alfajor or Arroz con leche or Helado

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Creative Team

Devised & Directed by	- Topher Campbell
Written By	- Fin Kennedy
Design by	- Victoria Johnstone
Digital Design by	- Roney Fraser-Munroe
Director of Photography	- Ian Watts

Reviews

What does it feel like to be an asylum seeker? The Red Room has already explored this area in Kay Adshead's The Bogus Woman, and now Topher Campbell delves further with this devised piece, scripted by Fin Kennedy, based on interviews with asylum seekers and immigration officers. From the moment you arrive at the theatre and are frisked, you get a tiny sense of what it feels like to be pushed about like an unwanted parcel and have everything you say disbelieved. What, too, must it be like to work in a system where profit is put before people and you must implement policies that you know are unfair. You cannot speak out because you have signed the Official Secrets Act.

Campbell's production bursts with good ideas, but despite excellent performances, this 90 minutes never fulfils its promise. There are some lovely touches, including the moment when a woman from west Africa talks about her hopes, her face shining with dreams of a better life, and her interrogators cannot meet her gaze as they know her situation is hopeless. It is painful to just stand by as you wait in what appears to be a Heathrow departure lounge and watch a woman being forcibly deported. The final scene, although improbable, uses the Englishman's home as a metaphor for a country where we slam the door and let people bleed to death on the porch, rather than let them in.

Too often, though, statistics speak louder than words here, and the filmed interviews with campaigners hit home more forcefully than the live action. The installation-style design with its central cage looks effective, but dilutes focus and lessens the power of stories that must be heard.

3 Stars - Lyn Gardner

The Guardian Read Full Review

Back in 2003, the homeless people’s theatre company Cardboard Citizens collaborated with the RSC to present a striking reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Pericles. Performed in promenade in a grim warehouse, it filtered the play through the experiences of modern asylum-seekers. Now this Red Room production, devised and directed by Topher Campbell and written using verbatim interview material by Fin Kennedy, attempts something similar – with mixed results.

Without the solid framework of a classic text, and with a less evocative setting, Unstated often feels meandering and slow. Victoria Johnstone’s design aims to transform Southwark Playhouse into a refugee removal centre. To enter, audience members must sign a form thrust before them by a vinegary female guard and submit to a body search. Once inside, they are issued with a mocked-up biometric ID card. The main space, stripped of its seating, is dominated by a chainlink cage – a high-security area, we are told. The next-door bar is rearranged to suggest an airport departures lounge. CCTV cameras and screens create a sensation of surveillance, and display both the live action and filmed footage of real detainees and activists.

The intention and the passion behind it are clear; the execution falters. Too much time is spent moving between spaces, and the action is frequently difficult to hear and see. The most compelling material is the video footage, which, while bringing home the power of the accounts it presents, highlights the shortcomings of the event as live theatre. There seems little point in an actor repeating words we have just heard directly from the mouth of the individual he or she is impersonating.

Kennedy’s script works best when he allows himself more creative licence. A woman’s interrogation inside the high-security cage affectingly turns testimony into actual dramatic incident. And the play’s final scene – the only entirely invented one – at last achieves theatrical lift-off. At a middle-class dinner party enlivened by recreational drug use, the question of asylum is debated with rank hypocrisy and without compassion – until a heavily bleeding man pounding at the front door signals the issue’s unavoidable immediacy: will they let him in, or turn him away?

Elsewhere, Unstated is a committed, serious-minded and persuasive piece of polemic; as theatre, it falls short.

3 Stars - Sam Marlowe

The Times Read Full Review

Arrive early to Unstated for a pre-theatre drink and you're in for a surprise. Southwark Playhouse has been transformed into an immigration removal centre, and the audience is frisked and glared at by a team of tetchy security guards before they can lay their hands on a gin and tonic (do failed asylum seekers really get tipples before being deported?).

For the play proper, we are herded into Southwark's cellar- like main auditorium, where a metal cage and a couple of video screens loom large. Director Topher Campbell and playwright Fin Kennedy have assembled filmed talking heads interviews, linked with the kind of shallowly dramatised scenes that make you long for voice-over by a man with a gravelly voice.

The show is a cursory if rueful and good-for-you glance at the experience of refugees and asylum seekers in Britain. We get snippets of testimony from the likes of Helena Kennedy QC alongside a woman from Togo and a man from Nigeria talking about their time in detention centres. 'The stories of asylum seekers are the Odysseys of the modern world,' says one interviewee. You can only wish they'd been told more fully here and that documentary thoroughness was proof of the show's passion for its subject. The play is billed as 'interactive' but it is only interactive in the sense that you can leave early.

3 Stars - Maxie Szalwinska

Metro
Read Full Review

This country used to pride itself on providing a refuge for asylum seekers from across the world. Why that’s no longer the case and what happens to people who come here needing asylum is the subject of ‘Unstated’, a piece of verbatim theatre presented by the Red Room. Director Topher Campbell and writer Fin Kennedy have clearly been shocked by their discoveries and consequently created a piece of campaigning theatre that dangerously takes the moral high ground as it harangues an audience that almost certainly shares its views.

In answer to the question of what theatre can add to the debate that other media can’t, the company has tried to make the audience feel what it is like to be at the mercy of officialdom. Immigration officers frisk us as we enter the theatre. Inside, we are shunted unnecessarily between two spaces and harassed by the guards.

Unfortunately, standing makes one unforgiving of a script that in any case doesn’t create easy empathy with the individual cases. The piece is an awkward mix of film and theatre in which theatre almost invariably comes off worse. On film, Helena Kennedy and a nurse who once worked at a detention centre prove more persuasive than the scenes that illustrate their points. The company’s sincerity simply can’t compensate for the clumsiness of the execution.

3 Stars - Jane Edwardes

Time Out Read Full Review

'Stories that refugees carry with them are the stories of our time - an odyssey' (spokesperson from 'Human Cargo').

Arriving at the Southwark Playhouse you are transported en mass to an immigration reception centre and handed an identity card as you enter.

Unstated is a promenade production of originality and daring.

This play is a brave approach to drama and one that ultimately succeeds after a few turning points which include the risk of worrying an audience with potential fatigue, both physically and psychologically. So be it. The performance sets out to be a true depiction of the often desolate plight of the newly arrived immigrant seeking asylum.

This situation and the strong message of man's inhumanity to man is powerfully and convincingly portrayed by a talented ensemble of actors. the The director, Topher Campbell, uses filmed clips from interviews with experts such as lawyer Helena Kennedy – "...to be called an asylum seeker is almost a term of abuse" – The Refugee Council, refugees themselves and other human rights groups. These images all form a backcloth to the moving drama.

The drama expertly captures the authentic voice of conflict, conscience and choice which is so often present whether or not it is something we seek.

It is the final scene I feel which gives the play its real punch. The raw message is powerfully acted with skill, humour and pathos and the final words….' It's your house are you going to let him in?' reluctantly bring the reply ' I don't know , I don't know…I don't know….'

These words were ringing in my ears as I walked out of the theatre.

'Unstated' is a morality play of our times. Go to be challenged. You may be uncomfortable but you may experience theatre as a potentially life changing experience.

Elizabeth Peasley

LondonSE1 Read Full Review

There were so many innovative ideas, clever sequences and solid acting in this production that it was a shame it didn’t quite work.

I think to blame was that there was no narrative or character exploration. While a screen projected interviews from experts and asylum seekers, you never got enough insight into anyone to really care or be swept up by their story.

There were nice touches; the cast frisked the audience and treated them as if they were at immigration on the way in which really irritated the American man in front of me who refused to sign the bogus form he was handed. It was amusing that he believed they were Southwark Immigration Control and didn’t cotton on to this bit of interactive fun.

Inside, the audience was frisked then herded between two rooms. A projection screen, real-time CCTV footage and actors entwining or acting round the on-screen testimonials.

The best bit was the last scene when the immigration cage became the front room for two young couples. It was great to see the actors get a chance to properly act even though there was still a tendency for over-exposition.

Ultimately, Unstated didn’t have the journalism of a documentary nor the engaging narrative of a play. While it fizzed with energy and innovative ideas, it was all too fragmented.

Review by Zia Trench (2008)

British Theatre Guide Read Full Review

I struggle down a rubble strewn alley, pass through a gate topped with spikes and am accosted by an officious woman in uniform who insists I fill in a form stating who I am. I am then unceremoniously ushered forward into a queue where I wait to be searched for weapons then photographed and issued with an identity card. At this point I am temporarily released from custody to collect my tickets to Unstated. I am, despite all appearances, at a theatre - the Southwark Playhouse - and already involved in a promenade performance event presented by The Red Room and TUC.

The advance publicity material tells us that; “Unstated is a powerful story based on the true testimonies of the men and women who seek refuge in the UK. Sometimes smuggled, sometimes forced from their own land… Part performance, part installation, Unstated is an interactive show presented in a promenade space with the venue being turned into a ‘removal centre’.”

If the welcome we have received so far is meant to intimidate and dehumanise us it has certainly worked and I head to the bar for a fortifying glass of wine, a relief not allowed to the real guests of Her Majesty’s immigration and repatriation officers I’ll wager.

What follows is a montage of experiences, some on video and some performed live. Some of them are ironic monologues - for instance when we are addressed by a smug politician extolling the Government’s policies on asylum seekers - and some of them are disturbing re-enactments of interviews with disoriented and distraught victims of abuse abroad.

However the most successful part of the evening is for me the short playlet at the end where a party of supposedly educated, allegedly liberal urbanites display their ‘informed ignorance’ of how asylum seekers are treated and their callous indifference to the suffering of others even when, or perhaps especially when, it literally lands on their own doorstep.

One of the most disturbing observations made is that the term ‘asylum seeker’ which used to describe a desperate and damaged group of fellow humans seeking sanctuary has now become a disparaging and xenophobic term of abuse.

Deviser and director Topher Campbell, writer Fin Kennedy, digital designer Roney Fraser Munroe, designer Victoria Johnstone and the strong company of committed actors - Marva Alexander, Alisdair MacEwen, Tosin Olomowewe and Clara Onymere - bully, guide and draw us through an enlightening, disturbing and at times moving event. Although whether an audience needs to stand for nearly two hours to get the full effect is debatable.

2 Stars - Keith Myers

WhatsOnStage Read Full Review

Stating points about the stateless and the state.

This latest political dispatch from The Red Room theatre company looks at how Britain treats people asking for asylum. Until the end, material is said to be verbatim, several people speaking for themselves on video or audio-recording with words starkly scrolled across the two screens in the suitably austere surrounds of a sculpted-out Southwark Playhouse.

First, we’re given a form to sign, then searched, photographed, thumbprinted and shepherded into a bar transformed into an airport departure-lounge, before entering the bare main space, with its central high-security cage. This becomes home to a tough interrogation played against video testimony from a woman from Togo, photographed against a green and pleasant map of England.

Ironically, this cage is used again for the final scene, the sole fictional one, where a young middle-class group sit around caged by their prejudices until decision-time knocks loudly on their door.

Unfortunately, this emphasises the low-key style of acting evident at many points, almost inaudible sometimes and lacking much beyond basic characterisation. Deviser/director Topher Campbell tries for just about everything, so the piece becomes an amalgam of production styles without much personal voice.

There’s realistic analysis of pressure within the press, stylised physicality as a woman is manhandled aboard a plane, documentary contributions, some with phrases marked out through repetition by the cast, beside the always dodgy attempts to treat the audience as part of the scene - though the cast catch well the mix of politeness and assertive direction by which uniformed authority ensures public compliance.

From the gleaming-toothed politician who begins matters with an inevitable powerpoint presentation on how the new, well-resourced Border Control is expected to up its figures of people taken into custody and removed from Britain, through the manipulation of a Black journalist (both verbatim from life according to the production’s declaration), to the final scene, those unsympathetic to the play’s viewpoint are unsympathetically presented. This weakens the case by overstating it.

Yet every old device, repeated, finds some new viewers. And the material gathered, plus the cast’s earnest adoption of so many presentational styles, ensures Unstated has, and makes, a point.

Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 July.

Reviewsgate Read Full Review


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