We are all connected, but often don’t realise how the lives of people thousands of miles away are entwined with our own – at least, not until a dead body drops right at our feet. Andy (Steven Rae) is in a DIY superstore car park buying paint while his high-flying wife Debbie (Balvinder Sopal) negotiates a deal with important new clients, when the corpse of an unknown man lands in front of him. Lisa (Hannah Donaldson), a bestselling crime writer on her way back from a book festival in Dubai, is sitting in comfort just centimetres away from the anonymous dead body when it drops out of the plane during its descent.
Andy is seriously shaken; Lisa sets out to discover the name and story of the unidentified man who was desperate enough to climb into the wheel arch of a plane at Dubai airport. But when the facts are in short supply, can you simply turn it into a fiction – and who has the right to tell the stories of refugees?
That’s just one of the issues raised in this latest piece from Analogue, a company that has always been interested in taking familiar stories and presenting them from multiple perspectives. Stowaway is a show that knows it’s not just the story that matters, but how it is presented too. That’s neatly handled in a fragmented production, with a set dominated by the skeletal fuselage of a plane which doubles as the Dubai construction site. The show combines sound and movement to good effect to give a sense of many stories unfolding simultaneously and a babble of conflicting viewpoints.
It doesn’t all work. The decision not to start telling the story of Aditya (Devesh Kishore), the young Indian man whose journey ends in a south-west London car park, until much later leaves us too long in the company of the dull domestic situation of Andy and Debbie, and the self-absorbed Lisa whose idea of investigation is to book herself into a luxury Dubai hotel. It’s telling that the writing for these three characters is far more flat and less poetic than it is when Aditya and his sister Salma (Sopal, doubling effectively) take centre stage. Then the story really takes flight as Aditya dreams of changing the life of himself and his family by signing up to be a construction worker in Dubai, only to see his hopes turn to dust in the desert.
Set against a background of anxieties around the foreign aid budget and immigration to the UK, Stowaway makes us empathise with a stranger, reminds us that we are all implicated in capitalism’s spider’s web, and asks us to consider from our secure place at the table why we are so resistant to countries and individuals getting their seat there too.
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At Shoreditch Town Hall until Saturday. Box office: 020-7739 6176. Then touring to 12 May
