A drama about the epic horrors that migrants have faced could not speak to the moment more keenly as the government fights over its own Rwanda bill and small boat crossings claim yet more lives. Created by Amit Lahav, whose grandmother’s flight from Yemen to Palestine in 1932 is a central driver of the plot, it is a production that is ravishing and frustratingly esoteric in equal measure.
Devised by physical theatre company Gecko and interweaving the migrant stories of its 10 performers, its drama is delivered through expressionistic movement, mime, music and dance, rather than words. What few are spoken come in a babel of Hebrew, Mandarin, Cantonese, Malayalam, Norwegian and Spanish, among others. This deliberate push away from reliance on language is a clever way of mirroring the incomprehension that a migrant might feel in a host culture, and country, but it locks us out of characters’ inner lives and the specificity of the stories being told.
