BWW Reviews: DO WE LOOK LIKE REFUGEES?, Riverside Studios, May 19 2011
Alecky Blythe's London Road is the hottest ticket in London Town this year - news of its run extending through the summer will come as no surprise to those lucky enough to have seen it already. Do we look like Refugees?, Ms Blythe's award-winning Edinburgh Festival production from 2010, also requires the actors to speak lines exactly as Ms Blythe recorded them. The voices sometimes whisper in hesitant English but more often erupt in homely, hilarious and harrowing Georgian (subtitled on beautiful back-projected photographs). The words are those of Georgians forced out of their villages by Russian troops in 2008 and living in temporary "cottages" that they fear will become permanent. As Internally Displaced Persons ("We are mountain people - this land is flat") their movements are circumscribed, with permits to be acquired and checkpoints negotiated, even to visit their capital.
But, as the play's title suggests, their tales are tales of asserting an identity through taking pride in the details of life. We meet a pretty young woman who scrapes a living selling bread, pretending not to like the attention of the menfolk; a young couple, thrown together by the arbitrary allocation of people to cottages, who are expecting a child; a barber, bursting with pride because his little shop has become the place to meet and talk; middle-aged men, all bravado and bluster, toasting Georgia and singing folk songs; a bus driver, wearily resigned to the arbitrary application of authority meted out by Russian soldiers, drunk or otherwise, manning the checkpoints. These people, living in limbo and speaking an impenetrable language, become real and recognisable - they want a place they can call their own, a future for their families and the freedom to come and go in their own country. Through their plain words, these plain hopes touch us.
At just under 60 minutes, the play is short, but the choice of material from the hours and hours of taped conversation, allied to the intensity of the emotions on display in wonderfully sympathetic performances from the Georgian cast, makes the evening as full as one could wish. You're left feeling little anger towards the Russians off stage but ever present, but a great warmth towards a group of people often forgotten in the whirligig of geopolitical manoeuvring. These men and women do not look like like refugees - they look like us.
Do we look like Refugees? is at the Riverside Studios Hammersmith until May 29
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