Exodus is something of a quirky offering at the Edinburgh Fringe – it’s a production from the National Theatre of Scotland (‘NTS’), whose production of Burn is in the Edinburgh International Festival. It’s got an obviously larger budget than many fringe productions, and, for a scripted show, has benefited from a surprising level of fortuitous timing. However, the NTS’ remit is to take stories to the space which fits them best, and it may well be the case that this show currently fits best on the Fringe.
The plot is one of a female Home Secretary, and her desperate bid to both control the narrative she is attempting to impose on the country, and to avoid the chaos which starts to whirl all around her. The Home Secretary – Asiya Rao (Aryana Ramkhalawon) – is the daughter of hard-working Ugandan refugee immigrants – so far, so Priti Patel. Her Special Policy Adviser, or ‘SPAD’ is Phoebe (Sophie Steer), the daughter of a British Engineering and Manufacturing magnate. Also present are Tobi (Anna Russell-Martin), a reporter for the Times, and Haben (Habiba Saleh), a character who whose story we slowly uncover as the play continues.
Asiya wants to be Prime Minister, and she isn’t afraid to hold some pretty fierce, and pretty right-wing views in order to achieve that role, and to build the Britain she seems to believe in. We begin as Asiya tentatively paddles into the English Channel at Dover, and Canute-like, tries to hold back the tide. Except, the tide here is of ‘migrants’, as Asiya defines the refugees and asylum seekers trying to find a better life in the United Kingdom. As Asiya is having photos of this moment taken, a baby washes up in the water of the Channel, and, in sheer panic, and encouraged by Phoebe, Asiya places the baby in her (very expensive) handbag, before she heads for the fast train to London.
It’s on the train journey where most of the action of the play takes place, and where absurdity upon absurdity begins to be piled onto our characters. By the time we reach the end of the play, it’s almost astonishing that everyone is alive, and, mostly unharmed, as we see Asiya’s plan for a ‘thermo-nuclear womb’ become reality in a scene which mixes live action with video footage. It’s in the play’s final moments that we are presented with the response to Asiya’s dangerous discourse, as we are shown footage from the Glasgow protests of early 2022, when Glaswegians surrounded an Immigration Enforcement Unit van, and refused to allow the people removed from their homes to be deported.
There are a lot of ideas being presented here: the residue of #MeToo; the public’s views on immigration, versus the politician’s rhetoric; who we are as a nation; the difficulties faced by career women who have children, or have varying degrees of physical or mental illness, and even; the overwhelming demands of capitalism. The performances from the four-strong cast are all excellent, especially Sophie Steer, as the increasingly harassed SPAD who becomes increasingly desperate to maintain control of the narrative.
The writer, Uma Nada-Rajah is responsible for The Domestic, one of NTS’ most popular lockdown shorts, and has written or contributed to some other, longer, works since then, and it would be fair to label her as an emerging writer. It is easy to understand the excitement that led to this play being staged in this year’s fringe – and to bypass the usual 12 to 18 months of workshops and rehearsed readings and rewrites that might be expected to be the usual course for the development of a new play by a new writer. And it can’t be overlooked that that process often saps the joy and excitement out of a project. Further, the immediate feedback of a live audience is in itself a valuable way to develop a project. However, on this occasion, a further revision of the script, to tighten up some of the various plot strands, and to determine which of the many narrative arcs is most important, would have been valuable. A further revision would have allowed what seems to be the main theme – of how refugees are treated, and what that says about us a nation – to be more developed.
A further edit would allow those interesting, but perhaps extraneous themes to be either pared down or removed, and to allow the large themes to be embedded more fully within the overall story, and those of each of the characters. In particular, Asiya did not appear to be in any way conflicted about her past experiences as a refugee, and the extremely harsh measures she intends to impose on those who find themselves in the same position now. Maybe that’s just her character, although the script at this point suggests very strongly that it really isn’t.
The idea of ‘what the public wants’ as opposed to what Asiya and Phoebe are telling Tobi that they want is interesting, and could perhaps be made stronger by that disconnect being raised throughout the plot, rather than as almost an epilogue at the end. The use of multimedia was interesting, but didn’t quite seem to sync properly in the performance we saw. This could again perhaps be considered for exploitation throughout the performance, rather than merely at the end.
This is however a strong start – and we’d encourage anyone who wants to see an early version of this potentially important piece of theatre to see it now, and to then revisit it, perhaps next year or in 2024, when it has had those further script revisions, and a chance to discover what it is it’s really trying to say, and how it wants to say it.
