We’ve all read articles describing the bureaucratic hurdles facing asylum seekers, but Theatre-Rites’ remarkable immersive show for the over-eights makes us feel it. There are times during this promenade piece, commissioned by Manchester international festival and featuring a cast including migrants and refugees, when it feels as if we have fallen into a cross between a Kafkaesque nightmare and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
At one point, the disembodied voice of Big Brother barks orders at us, in clipped tones, demanding that we fulfil increasingly impossible requirements, precisely mirroring those being asked of Mohamed Sarrar, a Sudanese refugee whose perilous journey is depicted in the show. The audience, too, fall under suspicion as we are suddenly asked to provide evidence that we have a right to be here.
It’s dislocating and a little bit scary. Frank Moon’s sound composition creates an unsettling atmosphere and Jamaal Burkmar’s choreography expresses the agony of uncertainty and waiting. Simon Daw’s design, with its constant images of dehumanising cages, makes the most of the venue, which was once the world’s first railway warehouse. The tracks still run to the door to receive cargo – in this case, it’s the human kind. One scene reminds us how people are processed like internet shopping orders and, in this instance, sent straight back from where they came.
This is all pretty grown-up stuff, and is done with the rackety swagger and invention that we’ve come to expect from Theatre-Rites, a company making shows for children that is right at the forefront of contemporary British theatre practice. As Mohamed sets out on his journey, his grief-stricken mother, waving goodbye, is conjured out of a suitcase. A tiny train passes over our heads, a drowning puppet is pulled from plastic waves into an unstable boat. The story of another refugee, Amed Hashimi, is told through a series of delicious pop-up pictures that neatly uses maps and photographs to detail his family’s travels around the world; in a poignant moment Michal Keyamo looks at the puppet that represents her five-year-old self.
As it soon becomes clear, everyone is an immigrant here. This is a clear-eyed, unsentimental show and one that both points to the imprisoning mindset of fortress Britain and knows that while kindness alone is never enough, it’s liberating both for those who give and receive it.
- At the 1830 Warehouse, Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester, until 16 July. Box office: 0843-208 1840.
