Writer: Nicola McCartney and Dritan Kastrati
Director: Neil Bettles
People-smuggling has featured regularly in British politics and the press in recent years but all too often is presented solely through statistics and images of faces packed into dinghies. Dritan Kastrati’s life provides a refreshingly human face to the experience of travelling across Europe and struggling to find a home in Britain, and, most remarkably, it all began when he was only eleven years old.
First performed at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, in 2019, How Not To Drown transforms Kastrati’s extraordinary experiences into a 90-minute pla., Nicola McCartney works with Kastrati to weave his account into a fast-paced drama performed by five performers, each of whom plays Kastrati at some point in his journey. This tactic could confuse but actually serves to draw out different elements of and responses to his personality, most memorably the humour of his defiant ‘formal complaint’ that he is being ripped off, having ‘paid all-inclusive’ for the journey.
Many members of the production team have worked previously for Frantic Assembly, and this is evident in the style of ‘physical theatre’ employed by director Neil Bettles and choreographer Jonnie Riordan. Intense multiroling, the occasional lift, multipurposing in the stage design (a steel barrier serves also as a door and bed, slickly manipulated by this very skilful cast) – it is all familiar but very effective in swiftly transporting the audience across the many hundred miles of Kastrati’s journey. Designer Becky Minto’s use of a revolving tilted platform is as visually striking as it is valuable in adding to the momentum.
The sound design of Alexandra Faye Braithwaite also works brilliantly in punctuating key moments in the action as well as creating a subtle atmosphere of menace, a reminder that an eleven-year-old is constantly having to ask himself ‘Are these people going to feed me? …beat me? …rape me?’.
Less subtle is the play’s heavy use of direct address, which is disappointingly all ‘tell’ and no ‘show’. Indeed, it is in the shaping of its material that the play falls down: it all feels rather flat, and it is only on reflection after the show that the risks and trauma Kastrati experienced really strike home. The play would have been far more powerful if it had honed in on either the people-smuggling or the failings of the foster care system.
No doubt the episodic nature of the play and the bathetic family reunion in Kosovo reflect the reality of Kastrati’s childhood, but these ideas could be retained in a script that packs more of an emotional punch and to give the play the climax its gripping source material desperately deserves.
Runs until 11 February 2023 then continues to tour
