First seen briefly last year on the Edinburgh Fringe where
it won a Fringe First, Lisa
Goldman and The Red Room's The Bogus Woman stands out
as one of those shows that
change lives. You can't possibly come away from it without
feeling a deepening sense of shame about Britain's treat-ment of its asylum-seekers,
even if, at the same time, you know the argument to be hopelessly one-sided. But then writer Kay Adshead hasn't set out to offer solutions but rather to wake us up to the infamies
perpetrated in our name.
The Bogus Woman, based on real-life experiences of asylum-seekers at Campsfield and Tinsley House Detention
Centre, charts the journey of a fictional African journalist and poet fleeing persecution in her own country (it could, I'm sorry to say, in the present
climate, be Zimbabwe), her arrival and reception here, and her eventual deportation and murder back home. But it is also a devastating indictment of institutionalised cruelty.
Anyone familiar with, need one say it, concentration camps, will recognise the
signs all too chillingly - the casual cruelties, the ''following orders'' mentality that adds
up to human rights abuse.
But Adshead shows us something else: the inability of good intentions to help. Some have called The Bogus Woman agitprop, but that demeans a script that never sinks to caricature and in the hands of its knockout
performer, Noma Dumezweni, who plays both victim and
perpetrators, do-gooders and oppressors, wrings the heart with her delicacy, subtlety, strength, and prodigious talent. She's the real thing, overshadowing Jules Leyser's All Words for Sex (Soho), another Edinburgh Fringe winner import which opened this week in London. Don't miss.
l The Bogus Woman runs at the Tron Theatre,Glasgow, from April 3 to 7.
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