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Physical theatre stars Gecko make their National Theatre debut with grimly perfect timing: ‘Kin’ is concerned with the plight of refugees and migrants, and opened its short Lyttelton run on the night the Conservative Party descended into (more) infighting over its preposterous Rwanda policy – I think Lee Anderson resigned while we were waiting for curtain up.
In many ways, this all serves to add a sharpness that’s otherwise lacking in ‘Kin’, which is ravishing, atmospheric and quite, quite beautiful but struggles for intimacy and definition.
Indeed, most of the specifics come from the accompanying bumf: we are told that Gecko founder Amit Lahav’s grandmother Leah made a hazardous migration from Yemen to Palestine in 1932, and that this show is inspired by his reflections on this. Whether or not Leah is supposed to literally in it I don’t know, but visually there’s a focus on a young-ish female character, who must negotiate a sinister, stylish nocturnal world of cramped little rooms and absurd, aggressive border guards, forever obstructing and belittling.
There is a distinctly Kafka-esque quality, as the various refugees appear to get nowhere, stuck on an endlessly difficult journey with an opaque series of stops.
It looks remarkable: Chris Swain’s lighting – much of which is hand manipulated by the cast – is out of this world, and gives the show its real identity, the sense that these people are stuck in a perpetual night, illuminated only by unfriendly glares of electric light. The mushed-up babble of languages the cast speaks is intensely evocative, as is Dave Price’s soaring music, also pointedly inflected by a multitude of folk forms. The constant eerie tableaux of bodies is hauntingly weird.
Still, while the rules are clearly different for movement-based physical theatre than text-based narrative – the show is part of the MimeLondon festival – I yearned for a bit more specificity over the course of its 90 minutes. Although there are more nuanced vignettes within the whole, the sum feels somewhat repetitive, a depiction of migration as a single nightmarish, geographically non-specific blur. Early on a couple of brief recordings of what might be Lahav’s grandparents describing their experiences play out – it’s a shame there wasn’t more of this.
I’m a grandchild of refugees too, and I’m not sure about the inference of relentless victimhood and lack of agency. I mean sure, my grandmother was literally deported to a prison camp in Siberia for a little while back there, but ultimately the experience had a happy ending. This is somewhat addressed at the climax of the show, where the company members introduce themselves individually and explain their own migrant backgrounds. But I do kind of feel that there’s a danger of well-meaningly fetishising the vulnerability of refugees.
Of course, Lahav and company have the right to tell whatever story they like, but the nature of the medium is that ‘Kin’ feels like it’s trying to be a broad articulation of the refugee experience, and it ultimately feels beautiful but one note.
Still, to restate the obvious, the context of ‘Kin’ premiering in the current political environment lends the show a moral forcefulness that makes up for shortcomings elsewhere.