Out of the Margins

WE ARE SEARCHING FOR FREEDOM IN EUROPE BUT WE FOUND NONE - "Strongest mental image from the whole time".

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s first full length play, winner of the Sky Arts Award for Theatre, tells the story of the Jungle refugee and migrant camp, where between 2015 and 2016 tens of thousands of people from around the world lived as they tried to reach the UK. 

A few weeks after Joe and Joe first visited the camp at the height of the European refugee crisis, they returned with a geodesic dome which they built with hundreds of camp residents, and the first Good Chance Theatre was born. For seven months it stood as a place of welcome, hope and expression, bringing camp residents together with international artists to share the human stories of the camp to a global audience.

In The Jungle, created alongside actors from around the world and performers who had reached the UK to claim asylum, the Joes depict the creation of a temporary community, as the lenses of the world turn upon it, from the cold and the desperation, to the community and the collaboration, its flourishing and infamy, through to the violent destruction at the hands of the French police.

Joe and Joe’s generous annotations cover every page - Joe Murphy's in blue, Joe Robertson's in black - and are imbued with the people, stories, experiences and memories which inspired the narratives and characters of the play. It is stuffed throughout with postcards from productions, printed newspaper articles from 2015 and handwritten notes, a picture of the real Afghan Flag restaurant that inspired the setting of the play, and includes a copy of an incredibly moving letter from a remarkable young Sudanese man “who ran the building of the domes, had fantastic language skills and always carried a ‘book of words’ for whenever he learned a new one, on whom the character of Okot was partially based". 

This is an incredibly emotive lot, packed with insights, experiences and debate - a highlighted speech “written in fury at a system of such cruelty and inhumanity” and the company voting in rehearsals about whether or not to include the image of the young boy Alan Kurdi, “arguably the most important moment in the ‘European refugee crisis’”.

There is so much for the audience to take in, in this cacophony of a show, and these insights give even more context, depth, passion and intimacy. About the judge who orders for the camp to be knocked down, the Joes say “the real judge from Lille actually came to see the Jungle. We all put on a HUGE show. Food, song, dance, WELCOME. To show her the people, the human reality. But still it wasn’t enough.” And "The nonchalant way the boys talked about their nightly, risky attempt at Good Chance [to get to the UK] was alarming and shocking for its normality. We worked to express that".

This is truly an emotional, passionate and powerful lot giving insight into a defining moment of recent British, European and international history and more importantly, the humanity behind the political and media narratives.