Musical spotlights Real World issues

“These songs were playing in the background while I was writing the script,” says Debuchelon, the singer-songwriter behind the political musical Welcome to the Real World, loosely set in a refugee camp in northern France.

Growing up in a mixed-race Christian and Muslim family, he spent much of his childhood dealing with “the clash of civilisations” in various forms, although he “didn’t really know it then”.

“My upbringing highlighted to me the very different understandings that people can have of what’s going on in the world… and conflicts of culture too,” he says. “I wanted to show why all of this has become such a problem in modern times, and the conversations that happen when people with diverging value systems come together.”

The three-act structure of the musical follows various people’s lives before, during and after their time in camp. When the local authorities move in to close it down, some of the refugees head for the coast to row across the channel. The characters include the local mayor, a charity worker, a zookeeper from Syria, an orphan from Libya, a drug dealer and a secret service agent.

“A refugee camp is the best platform I could think of for the dialogue. People have no choice there but to deal with each other,” says Debuchelon.

With heavy topics at the core of the script, is there a risk of gloominess? “I know it’s unusual, certainly not the fare of a typical West End musical,” he admits, “but I think audiences are yearning for material that deals intellectually with the issues of the moment.”

Debuchelon refers to the rise of the right in Europe, the pushback against economic immigration and the consequences of colonialism “which are arguably still having a profound effect on the world centuries later.”

He adds: “I know that some of the messages in the play will be difficult for people to hear, including people from refugee communities, but a play is probably the easiest place to handle them. In academia, I would need objectivity and pages of references. In a work of fiction, all that goes out of the window.”

The 13 songs in the musical have been written over many years. Take a Look at Me was written when Debuchelon was 21 and more recently he began creating content specifically for the refugee camp setting. “Theatre needs foot-tapping stuff that people can get used to quickly, catchy melodies that you want to sing along to,” he says.

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