In Their Own Waords
"It hit home how desperate asylum seekers coming to UK are - why would you spend weeks of discomfort fleeing to an alien culture unless your life depended on it?" Audience Member
"I spent the whole time wondering if there was going to be real fire! So I did feel tense when they did the bit with the water bottles at the end - when I realised what was happening I was frightened for a moment, which surprised me." Audience member
"I really enjoyed it. I can't wait to see the final performance. Sometimes plays that are about issues go around the block but this was very direct, the raw story. But it didn't shove it down your throat, it gave you time to find out about what the characters were feeling. It was a real eye opener, especially with the statistics, I didn't realise how bad it was. I learned a lot." Audience member
"Some bits worried me, the bits that worried me were the way that Esrafil, bits of it portrayed him as a complex human being and bits used him as a symbol of a poor system. Especially for me, knowing his story and how complicated it was. There was also very little mention of all the people that tried to help him along the way and many many people had tried, lots of people had tried to help. It is very important to give a sense of hope for the future and some of it felt a bit too easy, it's a bit too easy to condemn a system without mention of the people in it that are trying their best to help." Audience member
"[We used cast members' stories] to try to move off slightly controversial ground and into an area where also the stories could be authenticated more. You know, the sense that the refugee telling that story can authenticate that story on the spot, whereas Esrafil's story felt terribly inauthenticated. There are big big holes, not necessarily in the story but in the documentation that we were given." Alison Jeffers, Director
"[The scenes based on official] forms was an interesting thing because it was a kind of verbatim theatre but it was off forms, off paperwork, so all the original name, da da da, da da da, was verbatim from a form. But of course a form that a Farsi translator had filled in, which we tried to indicate by not having Esrafil represented on stage but I'm not sure that really worked." Alison Jeffers, Director
"I liked the different accents and how the different actors all played Esrafil and all said the same thing, it showed how you were a number in a system." Audience member
"When you are an asylum seeker or a refugee, your whole life is in the hands of the home office, they either make it good or bad for you, so it depends on the decision they take." Participant, originally from Nigeria
"I thought yes it would work because it's not only about Esrafil. Esrafil is a messenger and it's about a wider problem and a wider issue." Participant
"I never got the chance to change my words. I would have because when you're being interviewed words fight to come out all at once because they're running in your head all the time and half the time they never come in proper order because of their weight [...] In some cases I really felt confused as I try to highlight something but didn't come out as it should because of language." Participant, originally from Zimbabwe
