UNSTATED. To 12 July.

London.

UNSTATED
by Fin Kennedy devised by Topher Campbell.

Southwark Playhouse Shipwright Yard corner of Tooley Street & Bermondsey Street SE1 2TF To 12 July 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Runs 1hr 45min No interval.

TICKETS: 0844 847 1056 (24 hr No Booking Fee).
www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 July.

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.

Cast: Marva Alexander, Alisdair MacEwen, Tosin Olomowewe, Clara Onyemere.

Director: Topher Campbell.
Digital Project: Jake Strickland.

2008-07-08 08:19:43