Photograph: Nottingham Playhouse
After #RefugeesWelcome finished, there was an invitation for the audience to stay and hear the team who created the play talk about the process they went through to do so. I wanted to leave, on the basis that my review shouldn’t be shaped by that process, but purely be a response to the show. My companion disagreed, so we stayed and I got to hear the fascinating account of how the play had been created by talking with refugees about their tragi-comic experiences of Britain.
The discussion was warm, lively, and real – and more engaging than much of the play itself. I feel mean saying that, given the spirited performances of Christina Tsoutsi and David Sousa, and the buoyant sincerity of writer/director Rebecca Winfield.
Much of that passion and enthusiasm was to be found within the play itself. But the resulting piece was a collage with no central feature to hold attention. There was vivid poetic writing, some of it in the form of rhyme. There was emotive naturalism. There were sketches and skits. There was pathos, and humour. There were stark facts. And while there were points where it was captivating, and moving, it also frequently moved too quickly, racing to get something else across rather than letting the implications of a previous point settle.
Not only was the play stylistically varied, it also changed medium. A filmed sequence shown on a screen was amusing, but didn’t achieve anything that the performers couldn’t have done in person. There’s no doubting the honest intent of #RefugeesWelcome, and its sheer variety and energy, but in some ways that breadth was counterproductive. Still, as a graduation piece put together by students at NCN this was ambitious and brave - better to aim high and fall short than settle for accomplished mediocrity.
#RefugeesWelcome was performed at Nottingham Playhouse’s Neville Studio on Tuesday 21 June 2016.
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