The Bogus Woman
By Kay Adshead
Performer: Noma Dumezweni
Bush Theatre, London
REVIEW BY JONATHAN STRAUSS
Detention of refugees, and their resistance to the inhumane situation in which this places them, is not confined to Australia. England also has its concentration camps for those of the world's persecuted who arrive on its shores, and refugees charged with riot and affray for seeking justice in a land that claims to be democratic.
Kay Adshead, author of The Bogus Woman, says in the play's program notes that she "saw the dramatic protest on TV of the detainees at Campsfield [one of Britain's two detention camps: the other is Harmondsworth - JS]... I read hundreds of stories of refugees seeking asylum in this country ... all of these were sad, but some were sickening, so horrifying as to be almost unreadable. 'Inspired' by these terrible stories, I created my story. It is more shocking than some and less shocking than others."
The play captures many facets of the experience of a refugee: the circumstances that demand a decision to flee, the difficulties of flight, the treatment of refugees by immigration authorities and detention camp guards and management, and the legal quagmire into which refugees are driven.
In its last part it exposes the vulnerability of refugees who escape the detention camps to live in society without civil rights such as being able to seek work or to live where one pleases, when refugees often remain emotionally disturbed and wary of all authorities.
Noma Dumezweni, performing all the roles of the play alone, portrays all this with a skill that kept the audience absorbed throughout.
The Bogus Women, for an Australian visitor to London, presents a double indictment. The British government, including the present so-called New Labour one (although there is little new in its xenophobia) stands condemned.
So, also, at least from my experience, does any Australian theatre making claims to be outside the mainstream. Politically contemporary and adamant good drama is very hard to find in Australia. The walls of the foyer of Sydney's New Theatre may be lined with the posters of past efforts to achieve this, but the plays I've seen in its halls are not.
This is not for want of material on which to work, but apparently because of a lack of writers, performers and other theatre workers willing to rise to the challenge of taking on the system through their art. When a new generation of such artists arises a means will have been created for both entertaining and changing the world.