Playwright Fin Kennedy discusses his new play at Southwark Playhouse
What is your current play about?
UNSTATED is an interactive multimedia theatre installation for The Red Room, about the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers as they navigate the Kafkaesque UK immigration system. It also looks at the political forces that brought this system about, so there are scenes examining the role of the media in whipping up public hysteria and shaping government policy. We also look at the nature of the private corporations which run most of the UK’s immigration prisons. The whole play is based on massive amounts of research which I undertook with the Red Room’s director Topher Campbell, much of which he filmed, and a lot of it is used in the show. Topher’s vision was that the documentary material would provide the backbone of the play and the dramatic scenes would respond to it and interact with it. The result is a really exciting fusion of theatre and film, with live performers interacting with recorded footage. We’re also taking over the whole of Southwark Playhouse and turning it into an Immigration Removal Centre, so everyone gets frisked and fingerprinted on the way in. It should give the audience a taste of what these places are like.
How did you come to write this play?
I had an association with the Red Room under Lisa Goldman because I was in their writer’s group, so when she left I got to meet Topher. When he was looking for a suitable theatre space for this show I suggested Southwark Playhouse – their temporary home in London Bridge arches is so atmospheric, and perfect for a play like this which uses multiple spaces and allows the audience to move around. Soon after that he asked me if I’d like to write it, and I jumped at the chance. Something I’m always trying to do as a writer is seek out voices and stories you don’t see in the theatre very often, and Topher had secured an extraordinary level of access to a whole range of people, from refugees, to removal centre staff, to political activists, to lawyers and campaigners. It felt like a bit of a luxury to have instant access to so many experts and first hand testimonies; normally it takes months to build up that much research material on your own. They also got me into Colnbrook Immigration Removal centre, a grim high security facility near Heathrow, where I met a young Nigerian man awaiting deportation who had led a hunger strike and been beaten up by guards. It was horribly depressing, but his testimony and voice feature in the show so it was great to be able to do justice to his story, which otherwise would never have seen the light of day.
Did it present different challenges to your previous writing?
It took a while to get used to the idea that we were eschewing traditional narrative and characters in favour of a series of snapshots of different aspects of the immigration debate. Although some characters reappear there aren’t a core set which we follow through from start to finish, so that means you can't tell a story in the usual way. But what that frees you up to do is set ideas loose to flow through the piece instead, and look at them in a number of different contexts. My habitual ideas about dramatic structure were therefore challenged, but in a very healthy way. What I came up with instead was a sort of ‘telescope’ structure for the ideas and issues at stake – by which I mean starting close up with the stories of the refugees themselves, then moving out one layer to the people who deal with them within the system, such as Home Office interviewers, or detention centre staff. Then move out one layer further, to a tabloid newspaper covering an asylum story, then one layer further, to a scene with a Home Office minister. The final layer is a trendy middle class dinner party where the issues are under discussion in quite distorted terms, because by that point the general public are no longer really in touch with the reality of what goes on, it’s been filtered through so many different people’s agendas.
The other challenge was to write in response to documentary footage – the first scenes I wrote didn’t do this as they were written in isolation, and as such they didn’t fit the play. So I ended up having to go back and sit there with Quicktime open the whole time, watching interviews as I wrote, and helping to choose which extracts were going to be in the scene, and how to integrate the two. As a devised piece the actors also had a lot of input and it was great to share a rehearsal room with so many creative minds, though as we didn’t have a script at the start of the process it was also an exercise in speed writing! It was a fascinating experience which really stretched me as a writer.
Is working from actual testimonials limiting or liberating?
Totally liberating. Something I always strive for in my work is to actively seek out experiences I haven’t had – I get so bored with plays which are about the writer. I feel particularly strongly about this in the subsidised sector because when you’re in receipt of public money I think there’s a responsibility to seek out something new or unreported about the society which is paying you, and to bring it back to the table. I’ve become quite practised at research-led writing now, and I teach a model about it on the Goldsmiths playwriting MA, so this was quite a natural project for me to take on. But Topher’s approach wasn’t at all prescriptive; while there are scenes inspired by and cut with first-hand testimony he also said to me ‘What do you want to write?’ which is where the scenes about media and government came from. So as well as shaping testimony into scenes I was allowed to go ‘off piste’ and imagine scenes which the interviewees had merely alluded to, or to put on stage levels of the immigration food chain to which we hadn’t gained access, and to show some of the negotiations which go on behind closed doors. In this way I think drama and documentary have a very comfortable coexistence in this show, each complementing the other.
What are you hoping from your audience?
We’re all hoping it will move and outrage them enough to want to take some sort of action. The Red Room is a politically campaigning theatre company and everyone involved in UNSTATED would like to see things change around this issue. The reality is that the UK used to be a country which welcomed those fleeing persecution – we’re like America in that respect, we are a nation of immigrants, always have been. But now we take these most vulnerable of people, many of whom have been through levels of torture and sexual violence unimaginable to us, and not only lock them up but put them through the most disgraceful mental torture, with this draconian labyrinth of bureaucracy. All their rights are taken away – they’ve been persecuted by their own government, they have no rights under ours, and they find themselves locked away in totally unaccountable privately-owned prisons where all sorts of abuse takes place. The UK immigration system has been a political football for so long that it’s now totally out of control. This country receives less than 3% of the world’s migrants but years of vicious tabloid coverage has got everyone under the impression we’re being swamped. The facts just don’t bear this out: in 2006, the UK received 23,610 applications for asylum of which 10% were successful. Ten percent!
So we’re hoping to put the record straight. The show’s been supported by the TUC and The Refugee Council among others so there will be plenty of literature around if people want to find out what they can do. I’ve been lobbying government myself and we’re inviting various MPs and Ministers so let’s see what happens…
What are you working on next?
I wrote a crazy verse play, a modern Jacobean tragedy, at the start of this year, for my favourite small company Liquid Theatre. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written. The problem is it involves a cast of 15 so we’re trying to get a bigger co-producer interested at the moment – no mean feat! (Expressions of interest on a postcard please).
I’ll also be at the Edinburgh Fringe again this summer with my school group, this year it’s a series of gory urban fairytales set in East London called Stolen Secrets.
Half Moon Young People’s Theatre are reviving my hip hop drama about pirate radio, Locked In, for a national tour this autumn. I’ve also just finished my first radio play for Radio 4, that will be going out in September. Apart from that, I’m leaving London and moving to Brighton in September so I’m hoping to forge some links with the Brighton Festival. I’m looking forward to a bit of time away from the London treadmill to develop some new ideas under my own steam.
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