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Focus on migrant worker exploitation

Brian Logan

British theatre is finally waking up to one of the biggest stories of today in the U.K.

IT IS, by any measure, one of the most dramatic things to happen to Britain for a while. But while recent plays have tackled the railways, the police, the prison service, and the war, theatre's radar has yet to register the arrival in the United Kingdom of up to one million eastern European migrant workers. Now the subject is to be addressed, not by the National or the Royal Court, but by a rural touring outfit in the east Midlands of England, one of the regions on the sharp end of the influx of Poles and Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Estonians, since those countries entered the European Union in 2004.

The play, On Saturdays This Bed Is Poland, has found a perfect home with the New Perspectives theatre company, based in the east Midlands city of Nottingham. Unlike practically every other wave of immigrants in English history, the Poles (by far the largest group to arrive since 2004) have largely bypassed London. Thanks partly to the growth in cheap flights from eastern Europe to the English Midlands, they've headed straight to rural Britain, where agricultural work — well, it grows on trees.

In 2001, the largest ethnic community in the east Midlands town of Boston, Lincolnshire, comprised 161 Chinese. Today, more than 15,000 people in the town are from overseas. By some estimates, 10 per cent of Lincolnshire's population is now Polish. "We've had the most massive immigration over the shortest period of time that has ever been seen in this country," says playwright Julie Wilkinson, "and all in a very small area." You might expect her play to recount xenophobia, racial tension, and the struggle of small places to host big numbers of newcomers. But that's not the focus of the play. Ms. Wilkinson, who conducted research in the region, says: "People are not going, `They're taking jobs off us.' Because there's loads of work." There may have been "an upsurge in racism," she says, but its flashpoints were often football-related, such as when Portuguese workers were attacked after England's defeats in the European soccer tournament in 2004 and last year's World Cup.

Invisible scandal

In fact, the host community is conspicuous by its absence from Ms. Wilkinson's play. And that absence is part of the problem she dramatises: the isolation of migrant workers, their exploitation and their "almost Dickensian" living and working conditions, beyond the reach of British laws and social norms. "These are people working, in effect, in bonded labour," says Ms. Wilkinson. Their employment, housing, transport, and visa situations are at the whim of gangmasters operating in minimum-wage loopholes. It's the invisible scandal of contemporary English life, although it is becoming harder to ignore.

In Ms. Wilkinson's play, a Polish and a Russian woman share a single bedroom. While one works her shift in a nearby food factory ("There's nothing," she marvels, "that the British won't put in a pie"), the other sleeps, and vice versa, since the landlady is renting the room twice, keeping the two tenants apart. The tale deals with the fallout from the accidental death of Marek, a charismatic "hero of a thousand migrant workers" and singer of the acerbic folk tunes that act as chorus to the play; and with Mirka, his sister, who arrives from Poland determined to track him down.

"We were never trying to write a political drama," says New Perspectives' artistic director Daniel Buckroyd. "That's in the warp and weft of the piece, but we ended up with a bunch of characters who are intensely human."

Mr. Buckroyd worries about the ability of a resolutely British company such as New Perspectives to tell the migrants' story: "There's a question that looms over us: how do we attain an authenticity, how do we do these communities justice?" The only British presence in the play is the gangmaster's son, Evan, a pretty unforgiving portrait of a naive teen who sees his dad's employees as victims but not as human beings.

Ms. Wilkinson travelled to Poland, and the actors have liased with eastern European community groups in the Midlands. And the cast includes Beata Majka, a Polish actress making her U.K. stage debut. When she first arrived in Britain, she worked six-day weeks as a fruit-packer. "The first time I read this script," she says, "I was like, `Oh my goodness, it's my life.'"

Ms. Majka is the company's resident Poland expert, who rubberstamps Ms. Wilkinson's cultural references. These include the surprising fact that, far from directing their anger at the host community, her characters reserve it for one another. "When I went to Poland," says Ms. Wilkinson, "they spent a lot of time complaining about the Russians."

And now, says Mr. Buckroyd, "something that's been bubbling away between two countries for centuries is being played out in a [small house] in a Lincolnshire market town." As the play shows, it's an easy conflict for gangmasters to exploit.

What's exciting about New Perspectives' airing of these issues is that it won't take place in conventional theatres.

The show, like all of the company's work, will tour village halls, where local people will mingle, engage, and argue.

"Without a shadow of a doubt," says Mr. Buckroyd, "audiences will include members of the Polish community and maybe some other migrants. People will gather and talk about these issues. Individually and collectively, their feelings about what's going on in their locale will change. We want to provide the impetus for those communities to have a great night out and engage."

"Put simply," says Ms. Wilkinson, "there's a massive exploitation going on, by the richer world of the poorer. And it will continue. Because the economy works to suck cheap labour in from poor places. That's globalisation, isn't it?"

To which, Ms. Wilkinson's play gives a human face. "All these tensions, all of these unanswerable questions," says Mr. Buckroyd, "can and will fit comfortably into a village hall." —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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