How Britain deals with refugees is a major political controversy at present in the U.K. The nation’s South Coast is receiving large numbers of refugees in small boats and other watercraft; some 40,000 migrants have arrived so far this year. The beleaguered British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, was under serious media and opposition fire Tuesday for injudiciously describing this mass arrival of asylum-seekers as “an invasion.”
With that backdrop, Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre Company has opened a still-timely 2013 play from London, Rachel De-lahay’s “Routes,” a politically engaged piece that looks at the twin demons of government immigration policy: (a) insufferable delays in processing and (b) the detention of non-criminals in facilities that bear too much resemblance to jails. And this is, of course, hardly a problem unique to Britain; it roils throughout Europe and also on this side of the Atlantic.
“Routes,” which is just 80 minutes long, follows a young British Somali, Bashir (the excellent Lucas Looch Johnson at my performance), who finds himself effectively stateless even though he grew up in the U.K., naturalized but lacking full citizenship. In the detention center, we watch his friendship grow with Kola (TJ Thomas), an emotional young offender whose loving but struggling mom (Kristin E. Ellis) actually works for border control and, later, we also see Bashir interacting with his volunteer advocate, a well-meaning but removed young woman who lacks the ability to fix his situation in any kind of coherent or immediate way.
Meanwhile, we simultaneously watch another story involving a 40-ish Nigerian man, Olufemi (Yao Dogbe) trying to acquire a fake passport from one of the ubiquitous fixers (Kevin Tre’von Patterson) in order to get to Britain and just be with his wife and family. The play doesn’t so much explore the reasons for global migration as lament how inept even seemingly liberal nations have become when it comes to responding to the needs and rights of migrants in a timely and compassionate way.
In many ways, the play is a critique of bureaucratic power structures, endlessly empowered with putting people into Kafkaesque limbos. And with that idea in mind, director Mikael Burke’s production, with a set by Mara Zinky, puts a sheet of glass between the action and the audience; it’s a good idea in theory and symbol, but it comes at the cost of removing a lot of the liveness of the interaction between play and audience. The show is billed as “shattering,” so maybe it should break its own barrier.
As a piece of writing, “Routes” is distant itself: it has a clinical kind of detachment that sometimes seems at odds with the urgency of the subject matter. Burke struggles with making the end of the show really stick, a problem that I think is baked into this very short play that has many powerful individual moments but doesn’t always feel dramatically fleshed out.
That said, you also can see a clash between this play and a production that wants to assign good and evil more overtly and that doesn’t sufficiently embrace De-lahay’s determination to show us humans trying their best under an inhumane system. The staging turns Anka (Amanda Winston at my performance), written, I think, as a Polish immigrant, into a chilly, upper-class Brit (in demeanor, at least), which removes you from the play’s message of the dehumanization of fundamental human decency.
Perhaps that’s the difference between 2013 and the greater urgency of 2022, with this crisis still so acute, pervasive and damaging, but it doesn’t really serve this play.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Routes” (2.5 stars)
When: Through Nov. 20
Where: Remy Bumppo Theatre Company at Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont Ave
Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Tickets: $32-$40 at 773-975-8150 and remybumppo.org
