A glimpse of hope in a sea of sorrows

Daniel Nelson

Playwright Anders Lustgarten is angry – with Europe’s “staggeringly evil” policy of letting migrants drown in the Mediterranean, and with Atos, “They do their Work Capability Assessments, where they go to morgues, plane crashes, outbreaks of bubonic plague, and tell people they’ll be fine, it’s just a head cold, and by the way their benefits have been stopped.”

And as Lampedusa at the Soho Theatre makes clear, he’s also angry with Europe’s emotional frigidity, “the hatred and the bitterness and the rage”, which he contrasts with the spontaneous generosity and warmth of refugees and migrants who ought to be ground down by the dumb racism, the oppressive state, the rapacity of the 1 per cent who have captured political control.

Lustgarten also has a way with words – they spill out in a furious frothy torrent, uncompromising, targetted, pushing the harshness of people’s lives in your face. He’s particularly good at mocking abuse – of Iain Duncan Smith, of Russian tourists, of heartless corporations. You wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of one his rants.

Stefano is a former fisherman who now pulls migrants’ bodies from the sea. Denise is paying for her education by collecting debts for a pay-day loan company in England until she has to help the ailing mother she despises to face – and shockingly, lose – an Atos hearing.

In a series of alternating monologues the two characters, one in Italy, one in England, paint dramatic and moving word pictures of the grimness of their situations and rail about a world that has produced such distressing choices.

But Stefano’s humanity rises above the horrors that haunt him. Redemption comes through the guileless help and warmth and joy of a rescued Malian.

In England, it’s a poor, guileless Portuguese migrant who brings light into Denise’s life.

For Lustgarten knows that impermeable bleakness in the theatre is disempowering just as he is sure that “nasty throat-splitting competitiveness” is not the only way in life.

It’s good old lefty politics: left to themselves, untainted by corporate greed and political cabals, ordinary people are the salt of the earth: nurses (and fishermen and students) are good, the suits (and elite-controlled governments) are bad. You can call it left-wing bias, but what’s wrong with that when the media, politics, the air, are suffused with right-wing bias?

Lustgarten doesn’t provide answers (and calling the play Lampedusa somehow reduces Denise and Atos to a supporting role) but he coruscatingly spotlights what’s wrong.

It’s excitingly played out in a tiny ring, encircled by the audience. In a post-show discussion, actor Louis Mai Newberry (Denise) described the experience as “terrifying, but wonderful”. Asked about the experience from the audience’s perspective, a spectator also responded, “Terrifying”.

This is a humanitarian shout of rage and empathy in a world off-kilter, and terrific entertainment.

·  * Lampedusa returns to the Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1, from 30 June to 25 July

Lampedusa

Image by Soho Theatre