culture/activism

I have just returned from the second night of Le Dernier Cara­vanserail, a six-hour group devised piece of theatre told in two parts.

It is a massive under­tak­ing: an ensemble of 38 people, count­less scene changes, incred­ible props, all from France. In the end, I think it was too long, but the stor­ies they are telling – of jour­neys, over tor­ture, of escape, of endur­ance, of cruelty and hope – are too pre­cious and import­ant to be skimmed.

There aren’t too many happy vign­ettes in this play. And Aus­tralia does not come off well – nor should we.

Some inter­est­ing choices were made in the set, which made this more than just another refugee tale. Bil­low­ing silk forms a sea, and des­per­ate folk attempt cross­ings – and it’s all intensely believ­able. Heli­copters sound and uni­formed, helmeted guards are winched out from a slot in the floor at the front of the stage to be slid across and announce to the boat “Turn back. Aus­tralia does not accept you’ This same slot in the floor is later the train tracks in the Eur­o­tun­nel, where people cut through barbed wire fences to try to grab onto the train as it passes. So many stor­ies in one place: Afgh­anistan, Iran, Iraq, Serbia, the French Red Cross refugee camp at Sangatte, Chechnya, Russia… and a fas­cin­at­ing thing: the props, the sets, the actors were all wheeled around the set on little plat­forms and in between set pieces, the stage hands would race up and down the ramps and from wing to wing seem­ingly cross­ing at random. The wheels give me the sense that every­body’s lives are driven by others, that these people are not driv­ing their own paths. And the sea­sons and coun­tries indic­ated by dif­fer­ent trees, also on wheeled plat­forms, bare branches for winter, flame-leaved for autumn, gum tree green in Aus­tralian summer.

So well done, such atten­tion to detail in the char­ac­ter­isa­tion, in the mul­tiple lan­guages spoken and the poignant trans­la­tions pro­jec­ted as sub­titles onto parts of props and set. And such touch­ing, heart-break­ing let­ters from Nadereh, one of the women who was a source for these stor­ies, and songs, of life and hope inter­spersed with revolt­ing men for­cing women to work as sex-work­ers because they don’t speak the lan­guage, don’t have a pass­port and are sup­posedly ‘paying off’ their passage…

And then… across the way from where we were, Little Johnny Howard was hold­ing some Prime Min­is­terial Awards. A large group of people were out­side protest­ing… but I went in to the play instead. Still a little uncom­fort­able about that decision.