Writer: Freek Mariën
Director: Trine Garrett
Freek Mariën’s play The Wetsuitman returns for a week-long run at the Arcola Theatre in a translation by David McKay. First performed in 2022, this is an international mystery that combines police procedural, witness accounts and a deeply personal angle to examine the humanity of refugees and the dismissive indifference of the European countries they encounter. After all, “how can you be a missing person, when officially you’re not even here?”
On a beach in Norway, an unidentifiable body in an unsuitable wetsuit is discovered leading to a widespread investigation into who the person is and how they ended up there. Days later, a second identical wetsuitman is found in the Netherlands, and when the police abandon hope, a young journalist picks up the trail instead.
Mariën’s play first and foremost muses on the nature of storytelling and revels in its choice of narrative devices. But these have limited effect across the four subsections of the play, each set in a different location, creating huge digressions and character backstories that ultimately matter very little to the eventual outcomes of The Wetsuitman, and create significant tonal imbalance in a piece that begins as a comic spoof – eliciting howls of laughter from some sections of the audience – and ends as a terrible, if overegged, family tragedy.
The first scene gives the illusion that the actors are improvising, shrugging on their police characters and Norwegian location while actively acknowledging the creative and imaginative process they undertake as they spin little histories, physical descriptions and amusing traits in conversation with one another, both as ‘actors’ and their assumed creations. Much of this is broad stereotypes of angsty officers, chain-smoking seniors and sinister but effective medical examiners who become Dutch wetsuit makers and salespeople in the next scene, but there is some interesting depth to the process of making that occurs between the three actors.
Later sections abandon this style (and its humorous implications) for other theatrical techniques including vast and detailed impressions of the Calais Jungle, explaining its physical structures and nationality-based geography, as the search for the name of a refugee takes the case to France. Speaking into microphones, the actors try to depict the scene but with so much described to the audience across the play, a few visual aids would help to create variety here, particularly when pictures and film of the Jungle are already so well known.
Performers David Djermal, Eugenia Low and Youness Bouzinab carry the audience clearly through the four separate chapters, aided by Amy Daniels’s instructive lighting design, and while they become everyone from lifeguards to interpreters, architects, refugees, parents and scientists there is little to distinguish between their different characters, although that matters less across different locations, and it is always clear that they have changed persona.
The Wetsuitman begins as an exciting mystery and ends as a slightly sentimental depiction of refugees and family life that feels long at 85 minutes, each scenario and speech lasting just too long, slackening the pace in Trine Garrett’s production. And while the point of Mariën’s piece is that refugees are easily forgotten, the strong dramatic frame created by the police investigation is quickly lost.
Runs until 2 September 2023
