This theme of physical movement occupies a lot of stage time in Lampedusa. For an audience member the experience at times can be quite uncomfortable and disconcerting, and Lustgarten is quick to extend the metaphor. “It is disconcerting,” he concedes, the way he and director Steven Atkinson and the actors, decided to stage it. I tell Lustgarten that is sometimes feels quite confrontational, especially when Ferdy Roberts as Stefano, is quite forceful in his direct address and individually picks out audience members with the bright light of his torch. I ask Lustgarten what this symbolises. “The great thing about theatre as opposed to any other medium, is that the audience plays such a huge part in it”, he responds passionately: “for instance, Lampedusa is a play where only two people speak but it has a 100 characters: the audience. They can see each other, and the quality of their attention can change the quality of communication. It’s expansive.” Is this how Lustgarten wants an audience to feel? “Look, you can come and see Lampedusa and have a conservative ideology and still be moved,” he insists. “It’s not about trying to say here is a way to fix things, go and be a Stefano and rescue migrants. It’s about understanding that migrants will always keep coming, we can’t erect a wall. And I don’t want anyone to watch a play of mine and come out and say ‘That’s alright,’ and then go off and have a glass of wine. That’s a failure. I want arguments. In Shrapnel, we had elderly Kurdish women crying. Here, talking to people, they feel enlarged by watching the characters in the play become better people.”
Credit: Nick Rutter
Is this what he feels is missing from German Theatre, if a comment in a recent Huffington Post interview is to go by? “If you write this up,” he says, “reiterate that this is a huge generalisation that I am making. But the fact is, so much of German theatre seems to be about spectacle. No one is writing about what it is doing to Greece. Why?”
But why are we so obsessed with German Theatre, I ask, but Lustgarten throws the question back to me: what do I think? I suggest that British Theatre still seems a little mystified by itself and even feels, in London at least, a little colonial: it also plays less with metaphor, whereas the Germans are the opposite extreme. They were also prepared to embrace Sarah Kane when we were not. “But it is without heart,” insists Lustgarten, “And it is about looking cool whilst being politically evacuated.”
For his part the playwright sees himself as being the polar opposite of German theatre. Where is the German you? I ask. “No one is of my political persuasion, apart from Rosa Luxembourg,” he jokes. He admits that he doesn’t have a fear of strong emotions and he wants to write plays as conscious raising awareness exercises. “60% of people I spoke to while I was writing it hadn’t heard of Lampedusa – one of the extraordinary things about the timing was that suddenly everyone became aware of it during the run. So it was a very special privilege to be part of an evolving political consciousness.“ Referring to the character of Denise, he notes that “the Chinese are the fourth biggest minority in this country and are still treated as if they got off the boat yesterday”. Actor Daniel York, born of mixed Chinese and English parentage, chimes in on this. “There seems to be a sliding scale league table of racial abuse, with East Asian people very much the last bastion of acceptable racial discrimination in the UK.” The actor stresses that Denise’s relative normality in the play is important, as more often “East Asians are generally only ever in the theatre as either florid exotica or grim oppression porn.”
“Denise has been abused and unloved and for her to let down that canopy of distrust, is a big thing,” Lustgarten concludes. This is why he writes and why he made that move from activism to writing: because it allows everyone to explore empathetic situations such as this. “Activism destroys the ubiquity of neo-liberalism and pulls the curtain down,” he says. “Writing is less pedagogic, more emotionally driven and human centred.”
Will we be seeing further experimentation and different kinds of work from Lustgarten? “I’m writing a piece for the Magna Carta celebrations at Salisbury in October, called Kingmakers. It will be written in iambic pentameter and is a piss-take on all the Royalist propaganda out there at the moment. Then it’s an adaptation of The Damned United and a play about Haiti and how development is the new colonialism.”
I tell him about Michael Billington using a Harold Pinter quote to express how he feels about his plays: “Life is beautiful, but the world is hell.” He laughs but he likes it. “I think it would be cheesy if those people did more than they do,” he says of the characters in Lampedusa. “I’m not writing to win an Olivier Award. I write to put real people on the stage.”
Lampedusa is at Soho Theatre from 30th June- 25th July in association with Hightide Festival, Guardian Live and Unity Theatre. It transfers to HighTide Festival, Aldeburgh from 10th – 20th September. It will also go to Unity Theatre Liverpool and tour with Red Ladder Theatre.
Additional information kindly provided by Daniel York.
