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The Fare - Performance of a new piece of play written by Julie Wilkinson

The Fare is an original full-length play written to commission for the Library Theatre Company [LTC], Manchester. It received a public reading with a professional cast organised for LTC by North West Playwrights in September 2013 with a view to a future full production (pending the decision of a new incoming Artistic Director). The research aim is to devise a dramaturgical strategy to challenge the response of a host community to asylum seekers, furthering the LTC’s innovative use of non-theatre venues, during a move. Building on research underpinning two earlier plays (On Saturdays This Bed is Poland; Mirka’s Story: New Perspectives, 2007), Julie Wilkinson draws on personal interviews with asylum seekers and refugee organisations to demonstrate gender bias in International Law in relation to refugees, through the struggles of the fictional character of ‘Gul Makai’. Influences include Tony Kushner’s 2002 play Homebody/Kabul, and Debbie Tucker Green’s Truth and Reconciliation (2011) in that both disrupt chronology to deal with legacies of colonialism; The Fare is distinctive in inventing a hybrid comic structure that stages discontinuities of characters’ experiences, in transitory settings. Working on the borders between storytelling and drama the writer interweaves folk tales from the KPK Province of Pakistan with contrasting scenes of dramatic realism. This stylistic synthesis reveals the underlying causes of Gul Makai’s story, as the action invites audiences to connect diverse characters and by analogy, communities. The chorus of traffic wardens is an experiment that builds on techniques Julie used first in Abomination (Nuffield Theatre, 2001) and later in Scorcher (Action Transport, 2007); it functions to subvert the dominance of the single protagonist and challenge tacit hierarchies of perception. Response to the reading indicated that the unusual gender and racial casting introduces audiences to a dramatic world where intersections between communities offer sites of potential re-negotiation.