London
Calais
A new play
By Dermot Dolan

Barons Court Theatre to 08 May
At the Curtains Up Pub,
28A Comeragh Road,
London W14 9HR

7.30pm

Runs: 90 mins without interval

TICKETS: 0208 932 4747 /
londontheatre@gmail.com;  www.wegottickets.com/Calais) 

Review by: Carole Woddis of performance seen April 26, 2016:

Heartfelt response to a growing tragedy
A soft boiled egg. One of the ordinary little pleasures we take for granted in an every day existence. But what weight it acquires when you’ve been robbed of everything and it becomes the acme of a better life.

Playwright Dermot Dolan’s Calais is probably the first and won’t be the last play to come out of the present refugee crisis. An attempt to focus minds on the humanity of individuals behind the headlines, it’s based on time he spent as a volunteer in the camp. Staged in the basement of the Curtain Up Pub in West Kensington, it’s a heartfelt, sensitive response to the people he encountered there and as producer is also linked to the Brighton based Calais aid Hummingbird Project (https://www.facebook.com/Hummingbirduk/).

Based around four Eritreans who have managed to survive beatings, rape and life-threatening journeys across desert and sea, Dolan portrays with great sympathy the damaged lives but undimmed dreams still harboured by Ahmed, Tariq, Faven and Birhan.

Movingly, he shows the cost of survival in the nightmares now consistently suffered by them, the horror of the conditions under which they are now living and the motive that drives them to take even more risks to cross the Channel.

Like Jacques Audiard’s wonderful current film, Dheepan, England is portrayed as an idealised paradise. Two of them, somewhat implausibly, make it to England by swimming the Channel and have now set up the Eritrean cafe they always dreamed of establishing.

Dramatic license maybe, but it fits with Dolan’s main aim of showing why England offers such a tantalising – and probably mistakenly – powerful attraction to those whom desperation has made reckless.

Impossible to capture the squalor of the Calais camp, Grace Ward’s production l still manages to evoke a sense of wretchedness. Those faceless refugee voices too are served especially well by a convincing Michael Oku as Tariq, the young Muslim determined to break out of `the jungle’ and swim to England.

Moe Idris steadily establishes the emotional and mental scars of survival at all costs in his character of Ahmed whilst Linda Gathu provides a formidable portrayal of a young woman who never loses heart or hope.

Calais
A new play
By Dermot Dolan

Cast:
Moe Idris
Christien Bart-Gittens
Michael Oku
Linda Gathu

Director: Grace Smith
Lighting Designer: Leo Bacica
Stage Manager: Katharina Huchler

Producer: Dermot Dolan
Presented by The State of Grace

See also ARTS4CALAIS, proceeds from sale of the theatre tickets going towards the Hummingbird Project with arts pieces donated by six artists from around England.

First performance of Calais at the Baron’s Court Theatre, April 26, 2016

2016-04-27 21:09:29