Perilous search for a home from home

Daniel Nelson

How Not To Drown looks as though it will be another perilous tale of a young migrant making his way by truck and boat to Britain, but it morphs into a heartbreaking critique of our fostering system.

Perhaps we’ve read and seen so many reports of sinking boats and airless lorries that we have become a little blasé, even when, as in this case, the survivor is only 11 years old.

Yet this is a true tale, with a fascinating back-story: the rigid family-centred Albanian culture and the Kosovan war of the late 1990s, when ethnic Albanians rose up against Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbs.

The play disposes of the history lesson in an early scene, together with the character-forming training and testing elements in young Dritan Kastrati’s life, which turn out to be vital in his later despatch to Britain.

The journey is deftly written and acted, with some illuminating details. Sadly, Britain turns out to be a largely hostile experience, where Dritan is separated from his brother, who is already living in Britain, where there are procedures to be followed but not enough listening.

He himself often isn’t listening - or to be exact, isn’t understanding because he speaks no English, And when he starts to pick the language up he hears towel-head and Taliban.

He’s good at reading people, though, and reads self-interest, neglect and an absence of love.

These are harsh scenes, brief but honest, and painfully raising the question for Dritan of why his father ripped him from his family in a land where family is everything in order to send him to this strange land.(“I don’t know why my dad let me go … He wouldn’t have sent me unless there was a reason.”)

And then he’s on a plane to Tirana. Home?

How Not To Drown has a lot to say and think about in its 90 minutes. It’s worth watching and listening to.

* How Not To Drown is at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, E15 1BN, until 11 February. Info: 8534 0310/  https://www.stratfordeast.com/