Company
Ice and Fire Theatre Company has worked exclusively on issues around asylum and refugees for about five years. The company was set up by writer Sonja Linden with the three-fold aim of:
- Honouring the real life stories of individuals who have been displaced as a result of conflict.
- Channelling these stories into the production of high quality theatre.
- Creating insight into the refugee experience through education and outreach.
Linden was inspired to found the company following her work as a writer in residence at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, where she set up the creative and testimonial writing programme, Write to Life. Ice and Fire has produced two plays about refugees: I have before me a remarkable document given to me by a young lady from Rwanda , whichwas performed in 2003 and 2004 and Crocodile Seeking Refuge, which was performed in two stages between 2005 and 2006. While the original Actors for Refugees was founded in Australia in 2001, Actors for Refugees in the UK was founded by Christine Bacon for Ice and Fire in 2006. Actors for Refugees' first piece in the UK, Asylum Monologues , was created by Linden from a number of refugee testimonies and has been performed in different forms since 2006. Asylum Monologues can be delivered by any actors (three are needed) and altered depending on the audience and the function of the performance, giving it a flexibility which means it can be produced easily and cheaply and/or used as a campaigning tool. The company do not perform in theatre venues or charge to see it, preferring the piece to be, 'used as an advocacy and awareness-raising tool to be taken wherever in the country it is needed'.
The recent production of Asylum Monologues was performed in fourteen venues in the UK on the same evening of 21st June 2007 for Refugee Week. The play is described in the publicity material as 'an account of the UK's asylum system, in the words of the people who have experienced it.' It can be seen as a new stage in Linden's experimentation with verbatim material, begun in Crocodile Seeking Refuge . Unlike Crocodile , which developed into a single-authored piece, Linden seems to have found a format which suits the verbatim material. Although still credited to her (it is described as scripted rather than written ) the verbatim material is interspersed with more informative sections which discuss the politics and legislation which provide the backdrop for today's asylum debates.
