Moving meditation on small-boat asylum

Daniel Nelson

The facts are brutal, the performance is a dramatic meditation.

The facts are that 82 million people in the world today have been forcibly displaced from their homes. (And most, whatever parts of the British media try to suggest, are displaced within their own countries or nearby.)

About 15 million people are refugees (only about 8 per cent of whom are in Europe), and about 1.5 million others are seeking asylum.

It’s shocking, but it’s hard to embrace the meaning of such huge numbers and what the figures mean in terms of heartbreak, fear, disruption, injury, shattered lives. In One Who Wants to Cross at the Finborough Theatre two actors stand in for the disrupted millions. The main character is everyone who is or has been or ever will be desperate enough to risk a perilous journey in a small overcrowded boat in the hope of escaping from a situation in which there is no hope. 

Neither the boat seekers nor the boat providers are named. There is no geographic location, though reference is made to The Beast, the crazily dangerous train that snakes its way to Mexico for southerners heading to the US. All we know is that there’s a stretch of water that needs to be crossed.

In one stormy hour two men on a tiny stage take us through the negotiations, the journey, the deaths (and the intimate body search for money or valuables before they are thrown overboard), the desperation, the humanity in the face of personal danger, the arrival - perhaps “so

mewhere where all the days will look the same”.

The piece uses poetic repetition to emphasise the bargain on which everything depends - “the one who wants to cross” and  “one who cannot but cross”. Initially it felt mannered but soon I fell into the rhythm of the writing.

There’s not much action on stage, not much dialogue: it’s mostly narration. Actors Wisdom Iheamo and Ola Teniola are excellent. The direction and sound are subtly powerful. But you have to be attentive, to work hard. But you will be rewarded.

* One Who Wants To Cross, £18-£23, is at the Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Road, SW109 9ED, until 25 February. Info: www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk