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- guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 10 2000 01.05 BST
'I think Britain is very good at highlighting human-rights issues in other countries, but when it comes to just outside Oxford, everyone gets a little bit squeamish," says Kay Adshead, writer of The Bogus Woman. The play, which is being staged at the Edinburgh's Traverse, chronicles the experiences of an African journalist seeking refuge in Britain from atrocity at home. Adshead had been involved in the Campaign to Close Campsfield, the notorious detention centre in Oxfordshire, and makes no bones about views on Britain's attitude to asylum seekers. "I hope I've written a consciousness-raising piece of work which has the maximum impact," she says. "I didn't want to pretend there was any impartiality about it. I wanted the whole story to be totally subjective. Everybody else is giving their opinions on asylum seekers - you can't open a paper without seeing them - but I wanted this to be my character's point of view."
The Guardian's Michael Billington has called the play "a powerful, passionate, committed piece of theatre that, if seen widely enough, might change hearts and minds. The Bogus Woman does seem to be a little pocket of old-style 70s commitment in the otherwise soft environment of the Edinburgh festival. Having cut her teeth as a performer in the 70s, when "theatre belonged to communities and could be about the things that affected communities", Adshead finds it "strange that theatre stopped being like that".
She began writing in the 80s after working in improvised theatre with directors such as Mike Leigh. "The more devised work I did, and the more I realised that I was using the stuff of my own life, the more I thought: I can do this myself." She duly did so, and the result, a proto-Band of Gold prostitution drama, Thatcher's Women, was produced to acclaim by Paines Plough in 1987.
In 1996, The Red Room, who are producing The Bogus Woman, teamed up with Adshead to stage her Royal Court-commissioned millennial political epic, Bacillus. Both company and writer believe in theatre as a forum for social debate, but "even though everyone was saying they wanted a state-of-the-nation play, nobody wanted to stage Bacillus," says Adshead.
The Bogus Woman began life as a short play in a season of political work at BAC, south London, and Adshead starred in Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies while she developed the work further.
She is unequivocal about the climate that produced the government's Asylum and Immigration Act, which all but criminalises the seeking of asylum and stigmatises those who do gain entry. "It annoys me that we feel we have a monopoly on prosperity," she says. "And anyway, what's wrong with people trying to look for a better life? It doesn't take a great deal of imagination, surely, to get behind that idea. People say we live in a global world only when it suits them but, of course, the very parties most keen on global capitalism get decidedly protectionist when it is people rather than money that is on the move."
The nameless heroine of Adshead's play is banged up in Campsfield Detention Centre and becomes involved in the protests that led to the trial of the Campsfield Nine, the group of refugees who were accused and acquitted of rioting at the centre in 1997. In researching the play, Adshead got to know one of the nine, who became her primary source for the description of a system that "treats all these people as miscreants and wrong-doers". The play is a synthesis of several first-person accounts, "more shocking than some," says Adshead, "and less shocking than others".
Eager to distinguish her play from documentary, Adshead even wrote the play in verse. But hard facts are never far beneath the surface in a work that vividly dramatises not only the unrest at Campsfield but the thuggish and often racist backlash that followed. The protagonist describes in harrowing terms the centre's "prison for profit" regime, whose wardens are "hired to brutalise in 12-hour shifts at £4 an hour".
If all this leads you to imagine Adshead as some kind of firebrand, you'll have to think again. Her crusade is dignified by the fact that, as she says, "I'm not a militant or a far-left person."On the contrary, she projects the mumsy air of a well-meaning but faintly naive woman who has suddenly discovered something distasteful happening in her own back yard. When she began to research The Bogus Woman, she recalls, "I was just gobsmacked. I assumed, in my British liberal way, that people were nice to asylum-seekers. I find it really shocking."
Her conversation deconstructs Britain's treatment of refugees not from an ideological or analytical perspective, as we might expect from a "political" writer, but from one of compassion. Poring over Refugee Council records of asylum seekers' plights almost put her off writing the play, she says. "I've not got a very strong stomach and I found them terribly upsetting.
"I don't think this is a political thing. I think it's a moral and compassionate issue. When people are vulnerable, you give them the benefit of the doubt, until otherwise proved. That's just being kind." Far from suggesting political solutions to what the tabloids call Britain's "deluge" of illegal immigrants, Adshead reiterates her sense that "I don't think there are goodies and baddies - I think there are individual cases, and we should look at every case with a clear eye."
The Bogus Woman is empty of dogma and reveals remorselessly the human consequences of a system of which, Adshead believes, this country should be ashamed. One of the official persecutors in the play intones: "I would suggest that your whole story - the killing of your family; the rape - is nothing but a pack of well-schemed lies." To Adshead, it is the host, and not the visitor, who is guilty of the greatest self-deception.
• The Bogus Woman is at the Traverse till August 13. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
