CLOSED LANDS Comes to VAULT Festival

Drawing on real-life testimonies and featuring an all-female cast of migrant actors from Angola to Lithuania, Inédit Theatre Award-winning French playwright Simon Grangeat explores the history of the West's obsession with walls, who is allowed in and who is kept out.

It's 1989 and Europe is fizzing with euphoria and promise following the fall of the Berlin Wall; people are finally free to travel, live and love where they like. Thirty years later and walls are re-appearing all over the world, from Mexico, to the Sahara Desert, to the wall of water surrounding Europe and the wall of bureaucracy faced by asylum seekers entering it. Fusing poetry, satire, reportage, multimedia and traveller's diary, five women explore the stakes for the migrant, the politician, the CEO, the citizen and the media, and the cost - both monetary and human - of making it to the other side of the wall.

Writer Simon Grangeat said, "Closed Lands starts from this observation: when we put up borders between countries, who ends up in prison? Who is trapped in? The 'outlaw' is not, historically speaking, the gangster, it's not the one who breaks the law. The outlaw is the one outside of the protection of the law. In the show we start from afar, away from Europe, away from 'us', before the subject becomes intimate, becomes so very close. Closed Lands is a piece which retells how humanity finds itself behind walls, what happens behind walls."

Closed Lands is produced in association with Exchange Theatre, an international company which translates and produces unknown or rare French-speaking plays in English, with all their productions welcoming a diverse team of actors and creatives.

LegalAliens is a female led ensemble comprised entirely of artists who are migrants in the UK. The company advocates for more nuanced representation of first-generation migrants in theatre. Through a mix of traditional storytelling and multimedia, their work focuses on translations of plays about issues affecting contemporary society. Previous work includes Who I am (performed by migrants and refugees based around Haringey), The Return by Sergio Pierattini, Poker Face by Petr Kolecko, Generation Icons (three plays by central European writers) and the devised pieces Chaos (inspired by Pirandello). LegalAliens also offer free weekly workshops for migrants and refugees at the Engine Room in Tottenham Hale, and Foreign Languages Through Drama sessions aimed at secondary school students.

Simon Grangeat writes plays based on research and in-depth documentation mixed with non-verbatim writing forms such as farces, contemporary ensembles and song-writing. In 2011, he received a grant from the CNT (National Centre for Theatre) for T.I.N.A - A brief history of the crisis, which was played at the Comédie Francaise and at various national and regional theatres in France. Closed Lands won the Inédit Theatre award in 2012 and was selected by the Postures reading-committee.

Running Time: 50 mins | Suitable for ages 15+

https://vaultfestival.com/whats-on/closed-lands/ | 0208 050 9241