Anders Lustgarten, whose play ‘Lampedusa’ tackles the refugee crisis in Europe, tells Devjani Bodepudi he’s optimistic that humanity will prevail over paranoia.
I ready Skype in anticipation. I want this interview to go well. Anders Lustgarten has become somewhat of a hero for me, after I heard his Soho Theatre play, Lampedusa, on the radio.
After a couple of initial glitches, I’m able to set it up so he can finally hear me and I can hear him. I suggest we stick to only audio, as I know what net speeds can be like. The connection is surprisingly clear and conversation flows easily.
Throughout the interview I can hear the click-click of a lighter, I think. I can almost see Lustgarten sitting crossed-legged, tapping his toes and perhaps inhaling a cigarette. Perhaps it’s not a lighter but pen against a keyboard or something and I get the impression that he wants to talk about this stuff, but is quite impatient at having to explain it all again.
This stuff being the refugee crisis. The stuff of nightmares, people drowning in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe, where they might, just might, find a safe haven of sorts.
This stuff being the refugee crisis. The stuff of nightmares, people drowning in the Mediterranean on their way to Europe, where they might, just might, find a safe haven of sorts.
This is what Lustgarten’s play is about. Two protagonanists who have nothing to do with each other find themselves face-to-face with a reality they had chosen to ignore.
Stefano is a fisherman and trawls the Med not for fish, but for bodies that float to the surface, bloated and slippery. He asks why they come and he hates his job, but it’s something that he must do because it’s the only work he can find. Denise is a debt collector for a payday loan company. Efficient and pragmatic, she too can’t, or won’t, see the people she encounters as people. They are base, without character, always ready with an excuse, scroungers. Somehow, they are both forced to interact on a personal level with the people they see as so removed from themselves.
There is something about the rebel in him, the desire to shake the world by the shoulders and say, “Wake up and smell the shit! Everything is not rosy.”
The beauty of the play lies in Stefano and Denise’s redemption, as it were. It comes slowly, as cracks begin to appear in their hardness, much needed for their daily work.
There is poetry in Stefano’s dialogue when he describes the horrors that the sea vomits back. Beauty seems to seep through even through the profanity and that’s when you truly appreciate Lustgarten’s writing. He does it constantly throughout the play, marrying two things that should not be together, seamlessly without hesitation. A debt collector with a northern accent who happens to be of Chinese origin. Or when a debt collector is suddenly in-debt after an unexpected act of kindness, just a little bit of concern from a “friend”, something she never knew before.
I congratulate Lustgarten for the play, which had already filled my head with images I would rather not have been privy to, and I ask him what it was that got him involved with sending political messages and painting such pictures. He replies that he was “always one for stirring up trouble,” and we chuckle. There is something about the rebel in him, the desire to shake the world by the shoulders and say, “Wake up and smell the shit! Everything is not rosy.”
The white middle class, with their white children, were more taken with Alan because he looked more like them.
I move on and ask him why it took the image of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian three-year-old to get the world, and Britain in particular, to take note of the millions of people dying before they reach the shores of Europe? He lets me in on a fact that has so far gone ignored; in Lustgarten’s Lampedusa, they projected the image of a little black girl in a pink dress. She was face down, in the water, dead, drowned in her green tights. She could have been any little girl ready for a playdate with her friends.
But it was an image, although powerful within the confines of stage and the story, that people chose to ignore. This image did not rouse people out of stupor and fear. “It’s no coincidence that the little boy had much lighter skin,” he says. I suppose Alan looked more like the people Britain could identify with. The white middle class, with their white children, were more taken with Alan because he looked more like them. I sense the cynicism in his voice and I move on, somewhat sadly as I never looked at it that way. I question my own naiveté, being brown-skinned myself.
In the play, as mentioned earlier, the protagonists are forced to interact with people they would normally avoid—the refugee mechanic who fixes Stefano’s boat and buys him coffee, proving himself not to be a scrounger, and Carolina who actually invites Denise into her home for a meal, when Denise is normally shunned. I ask Lustgarten whether we should force integration onto people. Will that help community cohesion, will it drive out suspicion? And the playwright is perplexed. “Integration will happen naturally,” he says and we talk a little about the first- and second-generation migrants, schools where children encounter other children and slowly differences dissolve in the playground and in the classroom and in neighbourhoods. Humanity will see humanity when given enough time.
In a recent article for The Guardian, Lustgarten ended with the statement that migration would never go away and that Britain would need to find a way of dealing with it. I ask him whether he feels that as a nation, Britain is dealing with it and whether her people would be able to sustain this newfound compassion. He’s optimistic, citing examples of how people are helping and why they are helping. They’ve suddenly realised that refugees are not people who are entering Europe to take anything away from the people who are already here. They aren’t here to scrounge off the government; they are fleeing a reality that makes it impossible to for them to survive if they stay.
I take heart in Lustgarten’s optimism and decide to ask him about his opinion about the Syrian airstrikes that Britain has chosen to participate in. David Cameron said in Parliament that ISIS is a very real threat and that they have to be dealt with as a priority. Lustgarten’s response is that of derision. He sees the bombing to be a result of hate. “I doubt that ISIS has anything to do with it. The man on the ground getting bombed probably has nothing to do with ISIS.”
He sees the bombing to be a result of hate. “I doubt that ISIS has anything to do with it. The man on the ground getting bombed probably has nothing to do with ISIS.”
Lustgarten is cynical of the Tories, to put it mildly. Expletives pepper his prose as he talks of their deception and greed. In an interview with The Huffington Post he bemoaned the lack of alternative. There was none, in his opinion, but when asked this time, there is a noticeable change in attitude. Lustgarten is hopeful about the new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn. It was the lack of alternative and fear which forced people to vote for UKIP. And the people who voted for the Tories were the same people who always voted for the Tories, who carried roughly a third of the vote in the last general election. The people were disillusioned with Labour who offered nothing new or hopeful but Corbyn definitely offers an alternative.
The conversation was a hopeful one, much like the play, in fact. He believes firmly in humanity and its ability to see through the bullshit that tries to cover it up. Alan the little boy spoke to people’s innate need to protect and love. Corbyn appeals to people’s innate need for fairness. Only time will tell, though, whether Lustgarten is right in hoping.
