In Lampedusa, characters navigate very different waters to find common humanity
Vancouver’s Pi Theatre mounts the Canadian premiere of British playwright Anders Lustgarten’s acclaimed play
Robert Garry Haacke (left) and Melissa Oei in Lampedusa. Photo by Emily Cooper
Pi Theatre presents Lampedusa by Anders Lustgarten at The Cultch’s Vancity Culture Lab from May 5 (opening night is May 6) to May 21.
A FISHERMAN WHO who finds himself plying the Mediterranean hired by the Italian government to retrieve bodies of drowned refugees and a biracial woman in industrial England who goes door to door collecting payday-loan debts from people in the same social class as her: these lives may seem as far removed from each other as Earth’s poles. But in Lampedusa, a drama by British political playwright Anders Lustgarten, the worlds of the two individuals have parallels, each character finding hope in a place that’s all too easy to doubt: other people.
Pi Theatre is bringing Lustgarten’s story to the stage with the Canadian premiere of Lampedusa, which had its debut at London’s Soho Theatre in 2015. Director Richard Wolfe, Pi Theatre’s artistic director, says one reason he was drawn to the structuralist writer’s script was the way it plumbs heavy subject matter—such as universal issues of capitalism and austerity, and how systemic pressures on the global economy and labour market affect human migration—without being bleak; in fact, it strikes an entirely different tone.
Richard Wolfe.
“The two monologues are seemingly, at first glance, completely disparate, but actually by the end of the show the audience will realize that the themes are intermeshed,” Wolfe says in a phone interview with Stir. “Both Stefano and Denise: the situations [they’re in] and the jobs they have to do to survive made them quite bitter and a little bit closed off. Through the course of that story, they meet and befriend strangers; one meets a migrant, the other meets a woman who is defaulting on her payday loan. Through these associations, they become friends, and through these friendships, they rediscover their essential humanity. It’s important to see the commonalities in human life, in human experience, because if we don’t, we start…to pretend that somehow we’re separate from it all and that it can’t happen to us or it can’t happen here—and both of those are absolutely tragic mistakes to make.
“There’s quite a bit of humour in it also,” Wolfe is quick to add. “This play will actually make people feel good when they leave. I see it as a kind of cathartic play, almost. People will leave the theatre seeing the successful navigation of self in the sense that people discover a way to open up and rediscover their own warmth.”
Performing in Lampedusa (which was originally scheduled to run in 2020, pre-pandemic) are Melissa Oei, who has appeared in productions by the Arts Club, Green Thumb Theatre, and Ruby Slippers Theatre, among other local companies, and who will be at this year’s Bard on the Beach; and TV-film actor Robert Garry Haacke, who has appeared on-stage with The Electric Company, Green Thumb, and Dumb Instrument Dance. Both are graduates of Studio 58. The team worked with cultural dramaturgs, including local artists originally from England and Sicily, to deepen the show’s authenticity. Wolfe hints that Carolyn Rapanos’s stylized set design for Lampedusa will fill the entire Vancity Culture Lab.
He points to a quote from The Daily Telegraph that he says aptly depicts Lustgarten’s script: “A moving hymn to the small, transfiguring acts of compassion amid a sea of indifference.”
“The story itself reinforces the notion of the goodness in people, the humanity of people,” Wolfe says. “Through those friendships and by opening up their hearts, they [Stefano and Denise] find that they rediscover their own warmth and their own humanity. And I think that’s a beautiful thing to experience right now for an audience, to leave the theatre with that as a takeaway.”
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