It is not easy to cry in a small theatre, especially if – because of a tube strike and a heatwave – it’s not full. Especially if you are in the front row. Yet at the end of Lampedusa one woman was in full flood.
That woman was not me. Though nearly. Anders Lustgarten is a playwright with a mission. He wants to put on stage the terror of the world. In Lampedusa, this means bringing together two stories of injustice, a local and an international tale of callous disregard. An Italian fisherman collects the bodies of migrants escaping from the south. In the UK, a young woman collects debts from desperate people – she is, like him, in a growth industry. Both are brought to a new sense of themselves and the world by people whom they are rescuing and persecuting. Steven Atkinson’s production brings this home. On a stripped-down stage, Louise Mai Newberry and Ferdy Roberts (both powerful) eyeball the audience almost frighteningly.
Still, there is a difficulty. The stories are delivered as urgent testimony. The very best passages seem to offer new facts. The fisherman talks intimately, as an expert, of the ways in which bodies disintegrate – and you think you have learned some thing. Yet these apparently first-hand accounts are looped into an improbably hopeful plot. When I felt myself on the verge of weeping it was because I felt this was fact; afterwards, I felt it was fiction.
