Miniature epic about a monumental journey

Daniel Nelson

Flight is an epic refugee story on a miniature scale.

You sit in a small booth, don headphones, and a carousel slides into action.

Tiny tableaus appear and vanish, waves crash in your ears, or voices, music, conversations, aggressively squawking birds. A story unfolds, shown in 280 dioramas, about Afghan brothers attempting the dangerous journey to Europe.

You see the boys. They are static but alive. Their journey is hell, tossed by heavy seas, frozen in refrigerated trucks, trapped and exploited by fruit and vegetables farmers, preyed on by rapists, pushed around by armed police.

The carousel continues to turn, your booth reverberates with drumming, thrumming sound as tensions mount, Aryan and Kabir go hungry, are turned back, but keep trying to push on, driven by the mantra: Kabul, Tehran, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Paris, London. They wade into an Italian sea (the mini-dioramas stretch whenever a sea is shown): “It’s the best day Kabir can remember since they left Kabul”, says the narrator.

Two years pass in 70 minutes. The lights go out, the soundtrack ceases. “Your host is waiting to guide you to the exit.”

It’s theatre without live actors, but suspense, drama, pathos and interest are maintained by traditional theatrical and cinematic techniques: changes of pace from tranquil to stormy; shifts of scene and angle – suddenly the boys are seen in a room from above; switches from panoramic scenes to close-ups; shifts of mood in hallucinatory sequences.

It’s a clever adaptation of a book, Hinterland, by journalist Caroline Brothers, in which she drew on scores of interviews with migrants over many years.  It’s unique.

+ The directors’ notes for the production say that *As of May 2017 the United Nations Children’s Fund counted 300,000 unaccompanied and separated children moving worldwide. These are the documented cases. Of these, 100,000 were caught trying to cross the US-Mexican border and 170,000 lone child refugees sought asylum in Europe.”

* Flight at the Bridge Theatre, 3 Potters Fields Park, London, SE1, £18/ £3, closed on 15 December 2020 and plans to run again on 17 May-6 June 2021. Info: boxoffice@bridgetheatre.co.uk/ 0333 320 0051