Impressive if slightly annoying: Boat People at Pentameters Theatre
Boat People
Pentameters Theatre
Unreserved, £15
25 February 2018
Boat People page
It's exciting, if perhaps slightly annoying, to discover the first play by someone you know is dramatically cogent, beautifully written, entirely credible and also politically pertinent.
I do have a criticism of Boat People in that it is too short or rather that it is only half done. The author Emma Park argues that it was originally conceived as a radio play and that there is no more to come, which I think is first of all dubious reasoning and second of all a shame. What we have is a forty-minute cross-examination of a witness in a shipping insurance trial that in entirely non-facetious ways considers the human and financial cost of the migrant crisis and mingles that with a poetical hymn to the sea, its beauty and its dangers. What we don't have is a complete play or a work that makes the most of its engaging set-up and intriguing characters.
I was focussed on the writing but a lot of credit should go to actors Giorgio Galassi as the Greek witness Captain Papangelos and Louise Morell as the QC Miss Featherstone. The play consists of the dialogue between these two and rests on the tension between their two agendas; both actors responded with the intensity, commitment and authority demanded of each.
There followed a Q&A with the author where I was struck by the high proportion of female questioners compared to similar sessions I've experienced; and also by how a play that seemed so clearly to resound with my own views could seem also to resound with views from the opposite side of the spectrum.
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