a brave excursion into the dark waters of mass migration 

Anders Lustgarten’s drama boldly contrasts the lives of a fisherman retrieving the bodies of refugees drowned at sea and a Chinese-British woman who collects debts for a payday loan company

British theatre is full of plays about domestic politics. What makes Anders Lustgarten exceptional is that he thinks globally. After plays about Turkey’s Roboski massacre (Shrapnel) and post-Mugabe Zimbabwe (Black Jesus), he now turns his attention to mass migration. But part of the power of this piece, his best yet, is that it links a subject of international importance to our own society. Lustgarten achieves this through two interwoven monologues. One comes from Stefano, a former Italian fishermen who tells us “the Med is dead” and who now earns a living salvaging the bodies of migrants who have died making the perilous boat journey from north Africa to Italy. But Stefano’s terrifying story – and last year more than 3,500 refugees drowned in the Med – is complemented by that of Denise. She is a mixed-race Chinese-British student who is financing her Leeds degree course by acting as a debt collector for a payday loan company. Forever an outsider in Britain, she claims the Chinese are “the last ones it’s OK to hate”. Poverty and desperation are the themes. But what is striking is Lustgarten’s ability to treat them not as lofty abstractions but to give them a concrete reality. He has clearly done his homework and writes with gripping precision about the fate of dead migrants as they drown in cold water. Handling their corpses, as Stefano graphically tells us, “is like oiled, lumpy rubbish bags sliding through your fingers”.

This article was taken from The Guardian.