The Friend Publications
Two Caravans
The Friend is the world’s only weekly Quaker publication, based in London. Its acting company has been formed, with the help of professional RSC actor and director Colin George, for the express purpose of bringing this one performance to the Fringe.
The lot of the migrant worker is not a happy one, working in the shadows, exploited, often disrespected and feared by local people. By drawing their plight with slapstick humour, novelist Marina Lewycka brings their experience close, for when people laugh, they think – and often with compassion. The Friend brings the story of the exploited migrant in present day Britain to the stage through scenes from Lewycka’s hilarious second novel.
Performances:
8th August
Price:
£5.00 (£4.00) »
Comic, harrowing, informative, sympathetic. Brilliant.
A Reading in a Prologue and Three Acts
Comic, darkly humorous certainly, graphically descriptive, harrowing, informative, sympathetic. This show was brilliant.
Who would have thought that four people in a row sitting on chairs, their scripts in their hands, could show us all this. Make us understand what the conditions may be in England for a “seasonal agricultural worker” from Poland or the Ukraine. And what the reasoning is of the farmer with strawberry fields, or the manager of the battery hen shed, about what he pays and what food he provides. Show us the simple practical selfishness that maximises profit; it just leaves out that he is dealing with human beings.
Mind you though, the chickens in their stinking shed are definitely worse off than the human beings, even though the people sleep 6 or 7 to a room in a house that smells of “dead air, sweat, urine, faeces, . . . dirty clothes, old food, cigarettes and alcohol”. Marina Lewycka’s descriptions are vivid.
Basia Forrest, Daniel Jarvis, and Martin Trent give us Irina’s crisp opinions, Andriy’s dreams and Tomasz’ incomprehension. Irina also renders her mother, and her father, remonstrating, then sending her off on her 42 hour bus ride with bread, salami and poppy seed cake. Neil, managing the chicken sheds, has, like Andriy, dreams; the latter of prosperity, the formerof going to Brazil. When Tomasz sensitively recognizes Neil’s longing for a “voyage of discovery”, Neil is delighted. But Martin Trent also shows us the gross brutish agent who meets Irina off the bus, immediately securing her passport. And he sets forth the simple selfish economics of the bluff farmer who gives the strawberry pickers 8 slices of a 19p loaf of sliced white wrapped a day. With jam, cheese and sausage and strawberries “all they need” for a balanced diet.
This is superb storytelling, thanks to a skillful choice of episodes from Marina Lewycka’s book and, led by Colin George as narrator, impressive professional actiing.
This was a brilliant show. We’re only sorry you can’t see it. One performance only was given on August 8th. Until it appears one more time in Friends House, Euston Road, London.
Elisabeth Seale Carnall