Home truths about hospitality, asylum and climate change
Photo of Erica Tevares-Kouassi in The Guest: Hector Manchego
Daniel Nelson
The Guest is about global heating and refugees, about walls against strangers, about suspicion and trust
The play brings these huge, complex issues to life through three actors and a single set. Ambition doesn’t get much bigger.
On one side of the wall are a middle-aged English couple, Ricky and Joe, sweltering in their garden where the temperature is over 40 degrees and rising; on the other side are asylum-seekers from a nearby “hotel” and rundown flats.
In a series of vignettes, the stranger from overseas takes a walk, struggles in the heat, sells hand-crafted fans and rubs up against the couple: Ricky is warm and open, Joe is defensive and cautious (“like your dad”, he is chided).
The couple’s different approaches represent two attitudes to refugees and put a strain on their relationship, which is further tested by the clash between Ricky’s desire to go north to a cooler climate and Joe’s stolid unwillingness to give up what they’ve got — including a lovingly nurtured vine — and face the unknown (“I’m trying to protect you from what’s coming”).
The guest who passes by, and very occasionally is invited in, yearns for the security and rootedness on the garden side of the wall (“How I long to walk through the gate and just sit down”). The guest’s dignity and humanity, and needs, are movingly portrayed, offering a counterpart to Ricky and Joe’s nervous bickering.
The gap is so great that I began to fear the play might slip into a syrupy bleeding heart, right-on, earnestness. But writer Stephanie Jacob, who also plays Ricky, shuns over-simplification and never allows polemic to trump characterisation. She’s helped by superb acting and Cockahoop Theatre’s incorporation of real-life migrant testimonies into the development of the play.
The testimonies ensure that misunderstandings between host and guest are not dismissed merely as easily rectified mistranslated cultural differences or the hosts’ limited awareness. The most potent example is a vivid confrontation over a plea for a tampon and a private spot to insert it to stem the flow of blood. I am sure that scene became part of the script directly as a result of refugee experiences.
The Guest is both touching and bold, and though the title is a clue to its intent — that on a personal level a guest is to be looked after, not shunned — many in the audience will sympathise with Joe’s anguished cry that on the bigger issue he sees the problem but doesn’t know what he should do about it.
* The Guest, £18/£16, is at the Omnibus Theatre, 1 Clapham Common Northside, SW4 0QW, until 26 April. Info: Omnibus