Lampedusa

Anders Lustgarten has emerged in the past few years as perhaps Britain’s most visible and visibly engaged political playwright. He makes clear-headed pronouncements about the sorry state of political work in the UK, he’s a passionate activist, and his plays are filled with righteous fury. What’s frustrating is that, so far at least, they’ve fallen short of their palpable potential.

One half of ‘Lampedusa’ is Lustgarten’s best work to date – the story of a man from the titular Italian island forced by poverty to take a job fishing the bodies of failed migrants from the Mediterranean Sea. As Stefano, played by the intensely gruff Ferdy Roberts, hauls the huddled masses from the water, he feels the true cost of Europe’s closed borders in dead weights of decaying flesh.

Steven Atkinson’s direction and Lucy Osborne’s in-the-round design contribute to the occasional whiff of the ghost story or fisherman’s tall tale, both of which feel peculiarly inappropriate to the theme, but ultimately Lustgarten’s portrait is  haunting, potent and humane.

Sadly, the power of Stefano’s narrative is all but washed away by the twinned story of Denise, a collection officer for a payday loans company in the UK, paying her way through university by heaping misery on the miserable. It’s marred by the same unconvincing writing that plagued Lustgarten’s Royal Court debut ‘If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep’, ploughed under by cliché and inconsistency. Denise says she votes Tory but can’t resist a crowd-pleasing dig at Iain Duncan Smith – her character repeatedly collapses into a mouthpiece for Lustgarten’s message. She doesn’t live: neither in the writing or Louise Mai Newberry’s inconsistent performance.

Its politics, empathy and willingness to look further and push harder are all unimpeachable, but ‘Lampedusa’ sees Lustgarten once again struggling to wrestle them into theatre.