The Jungle (YV)

Friend of a friend worked at Oxfam, and her description of this was that it was uncanny in its accuracy – for her, walking into this set was déjà vu.

In 2016, two great works about the migrant crisis came out. Exodus: Our Journey to Europe was this story told by the immigrants themselves, their words their films their lives. It put you alongside the chaos and confusion of being on an overstuffed dinghy or nightmarish truck, negotiating the exploitative mob rule of buying your way across Europe, leaving one unwelcoming city and entering somewhere differently unwelcoming. It had no voiceover, little editing, no comment – it just looked. The other great work was Queens of Syria, about which Susannah Clapp wrote everything that can and needs to be said. What unites them is that they are both told by the people experiencing this without politicising or commenting, merely humanising an often too-distant news story. I watched Exodus on my sofa, and Queens at the Oxford Playhouse, stunned. Both of these had real people, describing real situations unimaginable.

Theatre, though, can do two things above all other media: immerse, and story-tell.

From the second I entered The Jungle I almost had to cover my nose. Being in the Jungle becomes a really shaking experience. The sound of a meeting or fight or who knows behind you, the constant hustle and bustle from before we even begin, the (edible!) food, the risk that you might (as I was) be moved or manhandled… Daldry and Martin and Buether turn us into extras in these lives, fellow residents, occasional friends, and equally desperate people, of course with the caveat that theatre can never TRULY recreate something like this, but it's as good a facsimile as can be. The sense of reality, the mess and chaos all around, is a triumph by Daldry and Martin. It really captures the sense of camaraderie, the sense of placelessness, and the sense of uncertainty. There really is no better way to tell this story than being this close to being there.

Storytelling makes anything palatable. As children, we make sense of a nonsensical world through stories, whilst we adults know simple narrative can’t make sense of everything. The Jungle is Safi’s narrative to a child, as he constructs a knowingly constructed narrative about how countries are created and communities thrive, about who immigrates and emigrates and why, and about the harsh, sometimes journalistic facts of the Jungle. It’s a different way to look at this situation, and one that’s valid and incredibly powerful, due to its construction never hampering its reality, and its child on stage a hideous reminder of the stakes of everything. Murphy and Robertson’s script is beautifully done. That it’s peppered with newspaper articles, clips on the TV, then goes into an epilogue about Safi’s untidy reality, reminds us this isn’t just his narrative.

We felt we were living in The Jungle; we learned about living in The Jungle. Most news stories are, if we’re honest, unimaginable. I can’t imagine what an Oxfam worker goes through when visiting corners of the world. I really can’t imagine living in a camp like this. Here you don’t need to imagine.

Does it matter that it was occasionally over-expository? Does it matter that key emotional moments were then footnoted with time-and-dated references to news articles or political releases, moments overexplained, scenes stopping to discuss political success or new terminology or distant laws? Does it matter that some of the experiences before the Jungle began, about why people are there, weren’t fleshed out fully, and the ideal of England was slightly underexplored? No. None of this mattered. There are a couple of points where I wanted characters like Salar and Okot to comment and judge (Was A.A. Gill attention-grabbing or patronising? When exactly WAS the time/place for the volunteers to be there?), and sometimes I felt that the show asked ME to comment and judge specifics but I lack the necessary experience and baggage to. But these minor issues are mostly in service to this immersive storytelling. It’s a show that felt lived-in before it started, from the Cliffs of Dover to the Afghan Café; where I wanted MORE information it would have been artificial to include, and where it (artificially) included too much it did so to thoroughly source its political blows, and did those blows land. It’s mostly an exquisite script, sensitive, broad, and rich, never pulling punches about the worst of the camp, the imperfections of the immigrants, and the pros and cons of the volunteers who went over to help (the authors themselves included; if it occasionally had to sound clunky to serve its purpose, so be it. It worked.

(and I’ve always had a soft spot for theatre that is child-like storytelling, and this works here: both with having a narrator story-tell, and a heartbreaking child who deserves happier stories than this)

That The Jungle is cast with people who’ve lived these lives, and written by two who lived there, matters. Everyone on stage – with foibles and hidden depths – put their faces on this often faceless story. From the food smells to the music played to the accents we heard to the lives themselves, this matters.

At the end, this lived-in recreation gives up the façade, and turns to documentary footage. As I’ve said, of the pieces of work about immigrants, something that’s stuck with me, and will until I die, is Exodus. More than The Jungle, by presenting without critique footage from immigrants themselves, this presents a reality as it is. But the documentary can’t actually put us there. The Jungle does, it presents a reality as it is – and I think Buether does so with accuracy and success despite the obvious metropolitan limitations. It’s a great script, and Daldry and Martin’s theatrical triumph, but one we pay for and can leave at any time.

Until the end. Then it’s no longer theatrical. Real footage of what we’ve been living in for two hours means we can’t chalk our experiences down to canny immersive theatricality, or a very strong script. We leave lucky to leave. Of course it ends with cathartic applause (a standing ovation), but before that it denies any true catharsis by reminding us that there is a real Jungle; this is only theatre for us, not for everyone. The Two Joes write an important political story, and the two directors lets the immersive Jungle itself take you there, but then that final footage from Calais today reminds you that it’s not a story at all.

P.S. The late great John Berger published in Ways of Seeing:

Watching the opening of act two – as the interrogation continued proper, and the brutality of escaping Calais was unforgettably laid out – this passage came back into my head, as the person in front of me downed her G&T, then slowly sipped her champagne.