One Who Wants To Cross. Finborough Theatre.

Marc-Emmanuel Soriano’s moving and deeply affecting story of migrants, One Who Wants To Cross, won multiple awards in the writer’s native France. It is easy to see why. The Finborough Theatre’s UK premier of this short work, translated by Amanda Gann and directed with crisp, paired back, elegance by Alice Hamilton, is a powerful and harrowing contemplation on a contemporary human calamity. It places the epic, almost odyssean journeys of African migrants centre stage and asks why so many risk life and financial ruin fleeing to uncertain futures in Europe.

In a nod to West African storytelling traditions One Who Wants To Cross is mostly delivered by an unnamed narrator (a skilled and engaging turn by Wisdom Iheoma). There are occasional vignettes of dialogue between the narrator and musician performer Ola Teniola, who drums out an intermittent note with his fists on designer Sarah Beaton’s silver-clad, boat-like set. Perhaps these beats indicate a change of narrative focus. More ominously perhaps they signify yet another migrant drowning.

Soriano’s narrative charts the intertwined experiences of three unnamed and undocumented migrants seeking boat passage across a hostile sea. Not all of them will make it. The complex disjointed narrative sees many happenings delivered out of chronological order, with events leading up to and during the perilous boat passage jumbled up. The narrative disorder can be challenging to deconstruct. Sometimes it is not clear which events happen to which character. But it is a tool that delivers the final bitter denouement with a hefty punch.

What impacts most in the story are the details. There is the 3,000 mile journey even to get to a port, and once there the challenge of finding and negotiating with venal and untrustworthy smugglers. There are the bribes to dodgy officials, the absence of sufficient life vests, the sickness on board, the bank notes that can only be hidden in braids of hair. For those who die afloat, there is the indignity of bodies searched for cash and then thrown over the side like bad meat.

Only one of the three protagonists is named, Moses, presumably a biblical reference to groups fleeing persecution. Much of the narration is delivered in a form the sets one character in direct opposition to another. “There is one who wants to cross and there is another who must not cross” the narrator explains at the outset of the work. This ongoing contrasting of intentions and desires is delivered in a structure that presumably purposefully echoes a biblical proverb. It offers a powerful reminder of how many Europeans see migrants as somehow fundamentally different from them; a process of oppositional ‘othering’ that dehumanises and diminishes those who seek sanctuary and safety.

Why do they come? “We’re dying slowly here like clams or moths” the narrator explains, adding “I want to be somewhere where all the days will look the same.” Motivations do not come much simpler than that. One Who Wants To Cross is not an easy play watch, but it is one the repays attention in spades. A thought-provoking, powerful piece of work.

Writer: Marc-Emmanuel Soriano

Translator: Amanda Gann

Director: Alice Hamilton