Review-Amid the Clouds-Hong Kong Arts Festival
2-3-14
By: Tom Hope
This show is billed as a ‘powerful drama that turns asylum seekers from cold statistics into human beings, recording their trials and hardships with honesty and great feeling’. I disagree.
The protagonists’ refugee status is dubious. The man is travelling to the UK for work. The woman hopes by giving birth in an EU country she can claim the baby’s consequent nationality. There is no hint given of why they are leaving their country (presumably Iran). We must take it on trust that they are more than mere economic migrants.
Whatever their claim to refugee status, the humanity of these characters is pared down to an existentialist wail, claiming no longer to know who they are or why they are making this journey.
The apparent logic of the piece runs as follows: refugee = displaced person = fish out of water = human being in water, up to his or her neck and beyond, drowning, naturally, actually…
Created in 2004/5, this international stage debut for Iranian writer/director Amir Reza Koohestani sets out to convey the human condition by blending ‘the rhythms of Persian narrative with the stark realities of a refugee camp’ (say the programme notes) ‘giving space for that which is central, the birth of narrative’.
It’s an austere poetic. For much of the time, the stage is in black-out as disembodied voices (one male, one female) speak through the p/a of their dislocated dislocation, centering on the capsize of a boatload of asylum seekers crossing the river Sava on the Bosnia/Croatia border and the search for one of the missing by the woman bearing his child. Each time the lights rise, a vignette comments on the commentary: a man and a woman meet in a bar by a river – they travel on a train through France – they lie inches apart, one above the other, on slatted beds at a refugee camp in Calais – but mostly they are in water, contained in three sizeable transparent tanks, in which we first see the woman immersed, fully clothed, her face flattened like a goldfish against the glass, air bubbling from her mouth before she herself blows out of the water to stand dripping and gasping before us…
As a metaphor for the human condition, it works on its own terms. The protagonists’ watery pilgrimage parallels the path we all take emerging from the womb and switching to the air’s oxygen.
Those terms are relentlessly grim. A baby is fed (or not fed) tranquilizers so its crying will not give away the group to listening border guards. A dead fish is laid out on a dish as the man shaves with a cut-throat razor, speaking of his nosebleeds. The woman’s eventual miscarriage is symbolized by her unswaddling a block of ice into one of the tanks where it floats, melting away, as we all must one day, more water to water than dust to dust…
This fractured re-fabrication of what may or may not have happened after the capsizing abstracts the characters to a level where it’s hard to care for them other than as cold statistics or (at best) abstracted archetypes. The reiterated imagery – water, blood, birth, death – is rendered (mostly) in monotones and monochromes to a soundscape of synthesizer backwash or silence. The production values are excellent and the cast of two spot on in their down-beateness. But there’s something missing from the message…
A refugee is a person who ‘owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion is outside the country of his nationality’.
Hong Kong currently accommodates (with extreme reluctance on the part of our authorities) more than 5,000 asylum seekers, mainly from Africa and the Indian sub-continent. Even after their refugee status is established (which can take over a decade) it is unlawful for them to work here (and, if caught, they are sent to prison for years - a minimum 15 months - at a time). Until they are relocated to an accepting country (which can also take over a decade) they must survive on a monthly allowance for accommodation and food (currently $1500 and $1200 respectively) which for many means living in slum-like conditions without toilets or fresh drinking water.
Right now, in protest, refugees are occupying the street outside the Wanchai headquarters of the Social Welfare Department in Queen's Road East. The protesters claim under-spending of up to 30% of the allocated food budget by ISSHK, the government contracted provider which dispenses these allowances. Their camp is a 10 minute walk from the APA’s Drama Theatre where Amid The Clouds is being staged.
I recommend you visit them there. You will find a determined and united but at the same time smiling and cheerful group of adults and children. It’s a salutary reminder of how, despite the adversity of their displacement, humans can construct narratives of hope rather than despair. These refugees’ circumstances may be undignified but they have not lost their dignity. (For more information, see http://visionfirstnow.org/2014/03/02/refugees-demand-government-better-monitor-food-and-housing-they-get/, citing a report in today’s SCMP.)
My point is this. Koohestani’s aesthetic (programme notes again) works through a stripping down to make the unfolding of the story the exclusive focus of the drama – but the story itself, focusing on the inward and downward spiralling of each individual, misses out on the mystery of the group’s resilience. That’s where the true humanity of the refugee experience lies in today’s world, along with those who respond to their plight by fighting for their better treatment. Amid The Clouds paints a poetic if not pretty picture of how things fall apart. To know what’s happening for refugees here in Hong Kong, go and support a different kind of theatre happening right now in your very own high street!
Amid the Clouds is playing through March 2nd. For more information, click here.
Comments
No comment at the moment.