“I am a human being. We are all human.” These are words we hear daily from refugees on news reports as they struggle to enter the perceived refuge of Europe. They have trekked on foot for hundreds of miles or crossed perilous seas in leaky boats. Thousands of them, tens of thousands of them. And that’s one of the problems; we only see the crowds, we don’t see the individuals. It’s hard to empathise with a crowd, it’s even harder to deal with it. Yet the crowds are made up of individuals, each one of them with a tale to tell, each one with a life abandoned and an uncertain future.
Kay Adshead’s amazing, disturbing and beautifully crafted play, The Bogus Woman, when it was first conceived, could in no way have foreseen the human tsunami which is now engulfing south-east Europe. Yet individuals seeking asylum and shelter have always existed.
The Bogus Woman tells the immensely moving story of an African girl who flees her war-torn homeland after she has been raped and her family murdered before her eyes. She arrives in England but her problems are not solved, they just continue. She is held in a brutal immigration centre, she is patronised by her solicitor who always has other things on his mind and she is disbelieved by the authorities from whom she begs sanctuary. She makes only one friend, a down-and-out elderly Irishman with whom she shares a squat. Krissi Bohn plays the girl as well as all the other characters, all fifty-one of them. Ms Bohn skillfully switches to and fro, making each of them believable, few of them sympathetic. They are by turn aggressive, patronising, brutal and misguided and display all the other unpleasant aspects of human nature of which we are all capable when faced with things we cannot understand, explain or cope with.
The girl, an outspoken poet and journalist, has left her home in Africa to escape violence and murder but receives little or no sympathy in England. She is slowly but surely de-humanised and de-humanisation is itself almost a form of murder. When you remove a person’s dignity, hopes and aspirations, and even the basic necessities of existence, they cannot be described as having a life. We witness the girl’s existence being slowly deconstructed. She is on a grim, heart-breaking conveyor belt as it trundles on to its ultimate and, sadly, fairly predictable end.
The Bogus Woman is compelling, harrowing theatre which fulfils one of the basic requirements of any form of art – it makes you look at the world differently. All those concerned have a right to be immensely proud of their achievement but most of the praise must go to Krissi Bohn who delivered a virtuoso, tour-de-force performance the like of which you will rarely see. This was a truly remarkable and memorable evening about an issue which is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore and will inevitably, ultimately affect all our lives. It makes you think. No, really, it makes you think. ★★★★★ Michael Hasted 18/09/15 at the Everyman Studio, Cheltenham
