‘The Jungle’ at SF’s Curran takes audience inside a refugee camp
The heartbreaking circumstances that force refugees to flee their home countries are all too often exacerbated by the callousness with which they’re greeted or turned away from the countries where they seek to build a new life. That kind of heartlessness only seems possible when they’re viewed as abstractions — as a mass rather than as people.
That’s one of many reasons why it’s invaluable to visit “The Jungle,” an immersive play from the U.K. now setting up camp at The Curran in San Francisco for its West Coast premiere. The theater has been transformed into the bustling environs of the Afghan Café in the former refugee camp known as the Jungle in Calais, France.
The creators of the play, Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, spent eight months in the camp in Calais, setting up a large domed tent there as a community center and performance space for the refugees — collectively known as the Good Chance Theatre — until the French government demolished the camp in 2016. Back in the U.K., the two Joes started creating a play based on their experiences in the Jungle, the people they met and the stories they heard there.
The ensemble features performers from all over the world, many of whom have been with it from its early workshops through the West End production in London. Several of the actors are refugees themselves, a few of whom stayed in the actual Jungle camp in Calais.
One of these is Mohamed Sarrar, a musician from Sudan who’s been working as an actor in the U.K. for the past few years. He first met the Joes while in the Jungle waiting for a chance to hop over the Channel.
“They set up this dome, Good Chance Theatre, and I went to find out what is it, because it was one of the biggest tents in Calais,” Sarrar recalls. “There we found people doing some music and having fun and singing. So I went to the Joes and said we can sing and play drums, can we have some drums? And Joe and Joe were happy to provide drums for us. And my friends and I started singing. Then I got to the U.K. and they contacted me about a workshop. I went to the workshop thinking it’s going to be like a music workshop, and then I found out they’d written the play.”
Perhaps inevitably, there are a lot of details in the show that take Sarrar right back to Calais.
“In the moments when I’m doing nothing in the play, just watching the elders when they discuss problems, I feel like I’m not in a play, I’m in the real Jungle camp in the Afghan Café,” he says.
Sarrar says he hopes audiences come away thinking about migrants and refugees as human beings, rather than as statistics or symbols of unrest.
“Some people say, refugees came here to our country to take our jobs, to take our benefits, to take our money, and they never think about why did they leave their homeland and cross sea and desert and go on such a hard journey,” he says. “It’s not just choice, that we just decided to leave. We have been forced to flee our countries.”
Ammar Haj Ahmad, who plays the guide and narrator in the play, was already a professional actor in Syria before becoming a refugee in the U.K.
“I understand that a lot of people say it’s a political play, it has a political statement,” Ahmad says. “I don’t know about that. I know certainly that this play is about the dignity of the human being, and the authenticity of this piece makes every actor who works on it really humbled and very grateful to be part of it. I hope people come and watch and get ready to open their chests and hearts and arms.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘THE JUNGLE’
By Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, presented by Good Chance Theatre, National Theatre and Young Vic
When: March 26-May 19
Where: The Curran, 445 Geary St., San Francisco
Tickets: $25-$165; 415-358-1220, www.sfcurran.com