Emigrants

It’s not often that you see a performer embrace a critic like a member of the family, but this is exactly what happens at the beginning of Emigrants, devised by award-winning Polish theatre company, Teatr WICZY. The audience are welcomed into the ramshackle camper van outside the Demarco Roxy Arthouse like long-lost relatives, piling into its cramped, Polaroid-covered quarters in fascinated anticipation.

Sadly, this vibrant atmosphere is killed soon after the play starts. There’s little continuity between the warm, eccentric beginning and the meagre action that unfolds. Emigrants aims—but largely fails—to capture the empty, shiftless experience of Polish migrants caught between a yearning to return to their native country and the desire to earn money in their new adopted home.

The two migrants who live in the van are polar opposites – one is a labourer, hoarding money for the future, while the other is an intellectual, seemingly out of place in his current surroundings. The relationship between them is far-fetched and never really comes to life, despite a particularly lively drinking scene in which they hand out shot glasses of Polish "Firewater" to audience members. The Polaroid photos adorning the cupboards are now a saving grace, and looking at them is a relief during the play’s duller moments.

Ultimately, the suffocation that the play’s characters experience are recreated all too well in its many fruitless, meandering conversations and the camper van becomes a sort of microwave, slowly simmering its contents away while we wait in desperation for the allotted time to end.