The Container

Published Monday 13 August 2007 at 11:10 by Nick Awde

There’s so word of mouth about this show that I won’t be giving anything away by explaining that this thoughtful play is set in a real container trailer. And in the audience goes to perch among the packing crates and boxes.

Within these claustrophobic dimensions, lit only by hand torches, we encounter first-hand the very real dangers of illegally entering the UK in the back of a lorry. It proves to be no gimmick as the weary, terrified travellers in the trailer reveal themselves one by one and we learn bit by bit about how they came to be here.

It would definitely be giving too much away to go into each character’s story. Suffice to say that they come from not quite the deprived backgrounds the tabloids would have us expect, and, because English is the language they have in common, we are allowed to observe them as our peers rather than as a foreign threat come to take our jobs and state benefits.

Director Tom Wright gets the best out of the performers - William El-Gardi, Mercy Ojelade, Deborah Leveroy, Chris Spyrides, Omar Mostafa and Doreene Blackstock, who each bring a raw energy to their diverse roles and nationalities. He is lucky to have such a finely tuned ensemble - and they have to be, since half the time they can’t see each other due to the constricted elongated space or quite simply because they’re acting in the dark.

Although Clare Bayley’s script struggles somewhat to fill 70 minutes, it succeeds not by harping on about how terrible human trafficking is but by emphasizing that these are real people with real lives, even, unsettlingly, those who traffic them.