Analogue’s co-artistic director Hannah Barker, talks about the research and development of their new show Stowaway. The production hits our stage next month…
A couple of summers ago, I remember talking to a colleague about staging the impossible. He wanted to have a live elephant in a rural touring show. Even then he was up against it, but as time went by, the live elephant became a puppet elephant and then finally, a projection.
I think about these conversations often because Analogue might have just found their very own live elephant show.
It may appear odd to compare a story inspired by a man from Pakistan who climbs into a wheel arch of a plane bound for the UK, to one which requires a live elephant onstage, but they share the same problem: staging the impossible.
We realized it early but it is all the more apparent after a number of scratch shows – with Stowaway, we are attempting to tell a story that is seemingly impossible to tell. Or at least impossible for us to tell. It’s a story that, in the most part, belongs in someone else’s world, one that it seems many liberal theatre-going audiences are uncomfortable with us talking about.
A few years ago we came across a tragic real-life story. A young man’s frozen body was found in the car park of a DIY superstore in Richmond. As the police traced his story back, it became clear that he had climbed into a plane wheel arch in the Middle East and his body was tipped out as the landing gear was lowered in its approach to Heathrow. This was not an isolated incident. There were many stories about equally desperate journeys from India, Africa, South and Central America. Some were stories about escape, others were about running toward something seemingly better. All of them involved incredible risk.
These stories made a deep impression but we asked how we, as white middle class British citizens, could possibly begin to understand and accurately portray a story so deeply removed from our own experiences?
To help answer this, we were awarded some funding from Creative Scotland and the British Council as part of their Connections through Culture programme, towards a trip to India. We took with us this extraordinary story and the lingering question of whether we had a right to tell it. Our three week journey took us from Chennai to Kolkata, from national concerts to rehearsal studios, lecture halls to school classrooms. Every meeting we arranged on this trip offered us a new interpretation of our story, each a contradiction of the last. This gave us hope that we could find a version of this extraordinary story that we could tell.
We started with the story of the stowaway, so powerful yet so unknowable. What made him decide to leave? What was going through his head in that tiny cramped wheel well? Questions we can never ask him. And so we just threw ourselves in.
Throughout the development of this story, we have shared it at various intervals with the public. It is continually fascinating to hear the different reactions – not necessarily to the story but to the act of our telling it. People naturally disagree with each other – some want to hear directly from the stowaway, others want the story to be about a multitude of stowaways – but surprisingly large numbers have raised this issue of our right to tell this man’s story.
This leaves us asking what does it mean to not tell this story because it belongs to someone else? And what is it about this particular story that feels so uncomfortable for us to tell? For instance, could we only do it justice if actual refugees were telling this story – even if it weren’t their story they were telling?
Our work is often inspired by often extreme true life stories, which bear no resemblance to our own – stories of suicide, schizophrenia, brain injury, memory loss. Are they judged to remain within our remit of understanding because no matter how extreme their particular experience was, the protagonist in those shows was from the West?
Of course, even though this isn’t our story, we’re taking our research seriously. We’ve met members of Platforma, part of Couterpoint Arts, an arts organisation run by and for the refugee community to talk to people with their own stories about the story we want to tell.
Our work has attempted to cross barriers between art and people by using art to get closer to people’s stories. While these stories belong to other people, with the right collaborators we have a responsibility to tell them, not least of all because some of those directly affected are not in a position to do so.
This story is about a stowaway – a story by it’s very nature that travels across borders. It has offered the biggest challenge to date in how we cross those barriers between stories that belong to us and those that don’t. If everyone only ever told their own stories to people from their own communities, I fear we would live in a very segregated world. Our work – and our understanding of the world – thrives on finding new relationships with different communities and even if we don’t always get it right, we might go some way to opening the door for those vital conversations.
Stowaway runs from Thu 5 – Sat 7 May, find out more and book tickets here.
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