Equity

Pick an issue, any issue, then ask yourself what you feel you, as an actor, can do about it. Not sure? You don’t have bags of spare cash lying around, you’re not the activist type and the thought of writing to your MP or signing a petition seems ineffectual. Sound like you?

That was me, too, about eight years ago, when I was an actor living a carefree life in Melbourne, Australia. Then, almost overnight, I was forced to take a second look at the country I had grown up in and thought I understood. Prime Minister John Howard, in the lead-up to an election his party was going to lose, decided to use 438 Afghan and Iraqi asylum seekers as political pawns. He refused to allow them, after being rescued from their overcrowded, sinking boat, entry into Australian waters. This stand-off lasted eight days, earned him an 85% approval rating for his actions and secured him a victory in the next election.

Despite this overwhelming approval, a number of Australians opposed Howard’s actions. Some of them were actors on a popular TV show at the time and they asked themselves what they could do. In the end, their actions were prompted by the Defence Minister at the time who managed the situation in the best military tradition, ensuring that the stories of those aboard the Tampa could not be heard. No doubt those stories would have aroused ‘greater public sympathy’, he said.

This small group decided to form Actors for Refugees and began performing readings of first-hand accounts of asylum seekers held in remote desert detention centres, and those living with tenuous status in the Australian community. So enthused was I by the utility of the concept, the directness of the performances and the audience response that I agreed to take on a voluntary coordination role for two years, as well as performing in various readings. The network grew very quickly once the word spread. The masterstroke was asking actors to do what they did best, as a way to speak out and take action about something they cared about.

When I moved to the UK in 2004, it became quickly apparent that there was an elephantine problem with public understanding of anything related to asylum and immigration. So I decided to start up a similar network here and came across iceandfire theatre, founded by playwright Sonja Linden, who had worked as writer-in-residence at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and wrote a play about one of her writing clients from Rwanda who was seeking asylum in the UK. She founded iceandfire in 2003 order to produce it. By the time I met her and her Co-Artistic Director Sara Masters in 2005, they had produced two very successful plays and were looking for a way to reach out to non-theatre goers and tell these stories in the words of the people themselves. So, it turned out to be truly serendipitous, and before we had even finished our coffee, Sonja and Sara had agreed to work with me on a new piece called Asylum Monologues, which the actors’ network could tour and which would form the outreach strand of iceandfire’s work.

Asylum Monologues was launched in 2006 and has been on a rolling tour ever since. Recently, iceandfire has broadened its remit to explore human rights stories, and Actors for Human Rights (as it is now known) also tours readings of documentary scripts about extraordinary rendition, the occupation of Palestine, undocumented migrant workers, and poverty and homelessness in the UK, with plenty more in the pipeline.