By Daniel Nelson

 

Eye Of A Needle

Eye Of A Needle

Image by Southwark Playhouse

It makes painful viewing – particularly because although this is not verbatim theatre or social realism, it draws on real case studies and testimonies.

Many of the harrowing experiences recounted by Ugandan gay rights activist Natale, for example, are recognisable: the life-threatening newspaper exposures, the battering-to-death of a gay rights campaigner, a priest’s funeral attack on the dead man’s wickedness. It’s all true.

But it’s not grim. There’s humour, including an almost Shakespearean comic interlude with a Ugandan determined to signpost his gay credentials in colourfully crude terms in an attempt to get through the eye of the needle.

It’s pacy, too. The whole piece is under two hours and hurtles along in a series of short scenes, briefly separated by the seven characters rushing between and around the inhospitable seats and the rest of the sparse furniture that cleverly and simply constitutes an immigration detention centre, the caseworkers’ staffroom, the lavatories, and an interview room. Playwright Chris MacDonald ends his notes about the set by saying, “The chaos of the system is unfathomable from the outside.”

Unfathomable is one possible description of the system caricatured here: cynical, superficial, cruel, erratic, chaotic would also fit. In the closing, desperate words of the Ted, the older of the two men charged with assessing the asylum claims, “I cannot do this properly. We cannot do this properly. We aren’t coping, we can’t cope…”

That’s the play’s take-home message, but en route MacDonald manages to pack in some interesting sub-plots and touch on difficult points, such as how asylum applicants are expected to prove their sexual orientation (“Any sex tapes?”) and how the assessment questions are loaded against them. The onerousness, not to say impossibility, of the immigration officials’ task is also acknowledged (”We have a responsibility to protect the country’s borders…”).

Of course, many aspects of the asylum rights of persecuted gay people  don’t get a look-in. Theatre is not the best place for detailed policy analysis. It’s a sign of MacDonald’s talent that despite a slightly repetitive first act and his desire to show a department that, in the current jargon, is not fit for purpose, what resonates most is the plight of Natale and Harrison, a Jamaican also seeking asylum.  It’s their lives that are at risk, not those of Ted and his sidekick Laurence.

 

·         Eye Of A Needle is at the Southwark Playhouse, Newington Causeway, SE1 until 20 September. Info: 7407 0234

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