Writer: Pavan J Singh
Few of us can really imagine what is like to flee your country, to be an ordinary person with no link to the wars raging around you and suddenly find homes and livelihoods destroyed. And while we hear the rhetoric of ‘small boats’ and immigration targets, there are many thousands of individual stories, of realities behind the euphemistic language. Pavan J Singh’s 60-minute play Refuge brings the stark humanity back into the process of packing up your life and seeking sanctuary elsewhere.
Shopkeeper Braham meets the love of his life by a pashmina stall in the local market and within a year they are married. Children follow and a settled life brings deep happiness, that is until the bombs begin and an adjoining neighbourhood is destroyed. With only one option for escape, Braham pays an exorbitant fee to protect his family and escape to France, only the journey brings its own danger and changes Braham forever.
In development since 2016, Singh’s play is an extraordinarily vivid and personal account of an ordinary life uprooted by war and the exploitation of refugees fleeing to safety in Europe. Although Singh never names the town or country in which protagonist Braham and his family live, the play establishes a contented existence, describing the first meeting with the woman who would soon become his wife and the happy home they create for themselves built on the generations that came before expressed not only through the shop that has been Braham’s family for 30-years but also the wedding jewellery passed from mother to eldest daughter down the generations tying this family to their history and this location.
The warmth of this is slowly infected, first by the distant sounds of bombs that Braham hopes will never get any closer, then the intensely authentic description of seeing local streets destroyed and dismembered bodies just around the corner. Singh pushes the audience to think more carefully about what they would do in the same situation, and if Braham appears perhaps naïve even in his wife’s estimation, the questions Singh asks are pointed – what would you do if paying a stranger was the only option and how do you cast aside decades of your life to bring only four bags with you for a family of five people?
Told as an unfolding tale, there is enormous tension in Refuge with the audience never knowing what might happen in the end as Braham’s family are first financially exploited by violent men who agree to carry them as stowaways aboard a cargo ship. Later, Braham endures devastating treatment onboard, building to a moment that is both shocking and deeply moving, particularly as a number of matter-of-fact conversations conclude the play before anyone has a chance to process it, least of all Braham.
It ends rather abruptly and there is probably scope for either a sequel or another 20 minutes of performance where Singh explains what happened next because this is far from the end of the story. Delivering his own monologue with a handful of props at the Etcetera Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe Festival, Singh creates such warmth for Braham that the terrible consequences of his story are disproportionate to the kindness and decency of the man he has created, but then that is the point of Refuge to show the audience the families just trying to reach safety any way they can.
Runs until 11 August 2024
Camden Fringe runs until 25 August 2024
1 Comment
Reality of today’s world of conflict and its impact on ordinary innocent people. Some countries have been experiencing it for years but now it appears to be on a daily basis and adversely impact even those who may not be directly involved but impacted especially in UK Europe USA and some other countries who practise freedom of speech/assembly etc.
There appears to be little hope in the near future for any solution to reduce the sufferings of those adversely impacted. Bless all