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The Bogus Woman.
Director Kully Thiarai, having brought Kay Adshead's refugee
drama 'The Bogus Woman' to a local community centre in Leicester
for its first performance, never expected a reaction such as
that coming from a woman, following the show, who she says "just
kept staring at us, saying 'that's my story, you're telling
my story, and nobody believes me and yet here it is'".
If this, in addition to waves of positive reviews and an Edinburgh Fringe First Award, was not evidence enough of the value of the production, then the positive reaction from two separate audiences comprised entirely of British Police officers has provided surefire proof.
"I remember thinking 'oh my god I don't know what this is going to be like'," Thairai recalls. "We made sure there was a discussion after those performances... and, though I did half expect there to be a real outcry about how the police and government were represented... I have to say I was pleasantly surprised that they put it in their stride and accepted that there were real issues that had to be resolved."
Adshead's story, inspired by controversial protests in 1997 at Britain's national refugee detention centre, Campsfield House, concerns the various troubles of an unnamed African woman who falls into the hands of British immigration authorities at Heathrow airport who, being rather distressed, is unable to satisfy her interrogators with an explanation as to her situation. Though the story at first concerns primarily this apparently 'bogus' woman, its strength, Thiarai notes, is in its universality.
"Whilst it's very specific, the reality is that it could be anyone at any given point, and it rings true in all sorts of ways... While there's a particular resonance in Australia and there are particular issues here in Britain, there seems a big question mark all round about how people migrate and what support we give them and why they're moving."
Apart from all the heavy themes of cultural and individual identity and political morality that necessarily follow, the performance carries a great intimacy and poetry, its language Thiarai notes being "beautiful and lyrical, yet very hard-hitting", and the smallness of the "actor-and-a-bench" production forcing audience attention on a single human performer.
Actor Sarah Niles, over a period of 90 minutes, shifts between 48 different characters to convey the web of dilemmas and themes that constitute the text. Despite the seeming enormity of the challenge, Thiarai asserts that she "does an extraordinary job".
Thiarai notes finally with excited uncertainty, "I'm very interested to see what Australian audiences will make of it and whether it will create controversy, or whether it will be something that people will go, 'well, actually, this raises some really interesting questions for us as a country'."
Wil McGinley
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'The Bogus Woman' opens on Sun 26 Feb at Queens Theatre
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