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THE PLAY ABOUT CALAIS
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The Play About Calais was first staged over four nights at the Hotbed Festival at the Junction, Cambridge, in July 2016. The cast was as follows:
Neal Craig
Helen Gould
Richard Heap
Kate Malyon
Patrick Morris
Charlotte Pike
Caroline Rippin
Helena Smith
Clemency Thorburn Tate
Grace Watts
Directed by Paul Bourne
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Characters
(gender can be shifted)
1, female
2, male
3, female
4, female
5, male
6, female
A, male
B, female
C, female
This play is written to be performed chorically; this distribution of lines is one suggestion both in terms of gender and number. A, B and C are facets of the Playwright. Subsequent producers are welcome to distribute the lines according to the company. The Play About Calais is designed to offer a context in order to raise money for charities that support refugees; any production should attempt to contribute to that task.
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ACT ONE
C sings W.H. Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’.
1.
1.The playwright decides to go to Calais.
2. With his piss-poor O level French.
3. Grade B.
4. Resolves to go to Calais.
5. As a political gesture?
2. To save his credibility as a so-called political playwright.
3. Because he feels stung, wrong-footed.
4. Baffled at how swiftly the world is becoming unrecognisable.
5. He’d written about migration years ago.
6. And he’d written again and again about this thing called ‘Europe’.
1. As a ‘political playwright’.
2. Whatever that is.
6. A political playwright living in Cambridge.
Well, just north of Cambridge.
1. Living off universities increasingly funded by student debt.
2. And theatres starved of Arts Council funding.
3. In a nice house with a garden.
4. Taboldking annual holidays in France with his family.
5. In his French car.
A. ‘Nothing fancy you know: camping in the Cévennes?’
6. Lowish carbon footprint.
3. Driving off the ferry cheerily at Calais and picking up the bypass roads.
B. ‘On the right, on the right, drive on the right!’
4. Driving through the tedious endless green sleep of Pas- de-Calais.
5. Brown signs to the Field of the Cloth of Gold or memorials to other slaughters.
6. Returning like a family in flight to catch the ferry from Calais to Dover.
1. Sunburnt, chilled out, car packed with family and tents.
2. Then it was 2014 – was it?
3. Only two years ago!
4. How fast the world tips from unthinkable emergency to normalised emergency.
5. Anyway, late again, taking turns driving, Orléans to Calais.
A. ‘A traffic jam!’
6. Sunday afternoon, late August.
1. A line of trucks a kilometre outside the ferry port.
2. Caravans, camper vans, family estate and saloon cars, four-by-fours.
B. ‘Shit. We’ll miss the three thirty ferry.’
3. Driven like lunatics from Paris and now…
A. ‘What the fuck is this about?’
4. ‘The eerie stillness of traffic at a standstill.’
B. ‘I said we should have left earlier.’
A. ‘There’s an hour before we need to board.’
B. ‘Queue must be a mile long.’
3. ‘Dad, who are those people?’
4. Figures dashing down from the dunes, in twos and threes, lugging rucksacks.
5. Young men in light, simple clothing.
6. Almost entirely, what,
Syrian perhaps?
Maybe middle eastern?
Eritrean?
1. His mind rifles through a checklist of physical clichés.
A. ‘Lorries slow beside us.’
2. Two guys – migrants? – spring out in the roadway, wrench at the rear doors of a van, get it open, disappear within.
A. ‘Should we report this?’
B. ‘To who?’
3. There! Another guy insouciantly loping off the barrier on the central reservation, pulling at the back door of a caravan,
swinging to road level,
checking out the undercarriage.
B. ‘Astonishingly blatant.’
4. No police, no one but us tourists, edging forwards under flashing lights, free to move but immobilised.
5. The kids look on, amazed.
6. The playwright feels grateful for the internal locking.
1. All at once they are changed from tired European holiday-makers to emblems of the West, bumper to bumper, vulnerable, disingenuous.
A. ‘Whatever we might think in our vehicles, however different we might imagine ourselves to be, we form one all too clear symbol of the life denied to these young men.’
2. He tries to catch the eye of one guy – not interested, he’s busy checking doors and locks.
And what does the playwright wish to convey?
A. ‘I’m on your side?’
3. Is he? Is he, though?
4. Now the flics come. CRS no less.
5. Unforgiving, unfazed.
6. To the right, in a hollow, a policeman sprays something, a huddle of migrants flinch.
1. The cops are outnumbered yet they seem almost bored.
2. Is this then a regular event, a ritual confrontation?
3. Reinforcements thread the roadways; the playwright’s car creeps towa...
