Reviews 2016
Reviews 2016
✭✭✭✭✩
by Abi Morgan, directed by James Richardson
Third Wall Academy, Ottawa Fringe Festival,
Academic Hall, Ottawa
June 16-25, 2016
One remarkable play at the 2016 Ottawa Fringe Festival is Fugee (pronounced “FEW-jee”) by British playwright Abi Morgan. Morgan, who has written for film (Shame in 2011) and television (River in 2015), has also written plenty of plays for adults (Tiny Dynamite of 2001). In 2008 she wrote Fugee as a play for teenagers to perform about refugees in Britain who are minors. Third Wall Academy, the youth training wing of the theatre company Third Wall, presents the play in a powerful, insightful production directed by James Richardson. Here is a case where having teenagers play teenagers works brilliantly. Not only do the actors learn about the difficulties that their peers suffer in this and other countries, but we are enlightened by the passion that they bring to their roles.
The play is performed by a ensemble of nine actors playing 26 roles. The casting is race-, gender- and age-blind. The play begins with the central character Kojo (Patrick Bugby) stabbing an elderly man (Jeff Clement) after Kojo draws a knife on his friend Cheung (Adrien Pyke). The action moves back to many different points in time to explain how this event came to happen. The action shifts back and forth in shorts scenes set in Kojo’s home country of Côte d’Ivoire, the detention centre for minors in Britain and a rooming house Kojo lives in after the detention centre.
Kojo’s escape to Britain was paid for by an uncle but Kojo was told to destroy his papers before he arrived. Morgan’s play ably depicts the alienation and distress of an unaccompanied minor arriving in a strange country, unable to speak the language and surrounded in the detention centre by others in the same situation. Cheung, his roommate becomes his best male friend, but it is a girl from Afghanistan, Ara (Helen Thai), who recognizes that something more than culture shock is preventing Kojo from fitting in. As we see in flashbacks, horrific events occurred on Kojo’s 11th birthday in Côte d’Ivoire that give him nightmares that he finds too difficult to talk about.
A major threat to Kojo’s ever feeling at ease in the detention centre is the doubts that those in charge have about his age. The detention centre provides food and lodging for refugees up to age 16. After that, they have to live in “hotels” and provide for themselves. After age 18, they are on their own. Without papers, Kojo has no way to prove he is only 14. Doctors examining him are certain his is at least 16 and think he should move out. Morgan has a character point out that it is to the government’s advantage to overestimate the age of refugee minors because it reduces the cost of their upkeep. With his psychological damage untreated, Kojo’s move outside the centre will only lead to disaster.
Morgan’s exposé of the treatment of refugee minors in Britain will certainly make audience members wonder about the system is in Canada. The actors do not adopt British accents and Britain itself is never named to suggest that the plight of refugee minors is similar in developed Western nations. It’s no accident that the favourite movie of the young refugees is X-Men (2000) about a haven for mutants that the government seeks to destroy.
Following Brecht, Morgan uses various alienation devices to prevent a simple identification of the audience with Kojo in order to make it aware of the general problem of refugee treatment of which Kojo is one victim. In fact, throughout the action several of the other teenaged refugees will begin to tell their own stories only to stop short and tell us, “But this story is about Kojo”. Morgan’s play is divided into a large number of very short scenes that stop the moment they make their point. The fractured structure reflects the fractured world the young refugees now live in. Actors often not only speak directly to the audience but comment on their roles and how they as an actor are different from the character they are playing. This not only reminds us that we are seeing a play but acknowledges the difference between the privileged teens who are the actors and the statusless teens they are playing.
James Richardson has molded the nine actors into a highly efficient ensemble. Patrick Bugby plays only one role, but the other eight actors play up to five roles and Richardson has helped them make sure that the actors strongly differentiate these roles. The initial scene where Kojo stabs an elderly man is replayed at least twice more during the action and the precision with which the ensemble recreates this scene is amazing.
Among the standouts are Patrick Bugby as Kojo and Helen Thai as Ara. Bugby shows the difference between the easy-going Kojo before the events of his 11th birthday and the psychologically damaged Kojo who arrives in Britain. In the detention centre Kojo is confused and his emotions bottled-up. He achieves some degree of trust with Ara but not enough to tell his story to the counsellors who need to hear it to judge his age more accurately. Thai is very persuasive as Ara, someone who senses instinctively why Kojo is so incommunicative. Ara’s anger at the adults and other teens shows that she is as tough as any of the rest, but Thai shows that beneath that toughness is a compassion that is beyond the other’s abilities.
Morgan may have written the play in 2008, but seems even more relevant now. It is a brilliant idea to have teen actors engage with this kind of material. They all know they are doing an important work and that seems to have galvanized them to do their very best. With its many scene and character changes the play is far from easy, but the Third Wall Academy appears to have embraced this complexity as a challenge and presents the work with palpable emotion. This is a play to see for the play itself and for its many fine performances. Let’s hope that other teen acting groups take on Morgan’s work which serves as a real eye-opener about young refugees’ experiences.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Helen Thai as Ara and the cast of Fugee. ©2016.
For tickets, visit http://ottawafringe.com.
2016-06-17
Fugee