About THE CONTAINER

My first play, Northern Lights, was the story of a Kurdish refugee in London. Although I went on to write other plays on other subjects, I kept coming back to stories of refugees and migrants coming to this country. In many ways those seem like the most important stories there are to tell at the moment. The more I encountered people who had come to the UK fleeing persecution or poverty, the more all other stories seemed to pale into insignificance.

Immigration has always been an integral part of our country’s make up, and never more so than now. Yet despite this, the coverage these stories get in much of the mainstream media focuses entirely on a xenophobic, NIMBY-ish little Englander point of view. The real story – the story of what people have come from, what they have gone through to get here, and what they are confronted with when they do arrive – is largely ignored.

As a playwright, it was this I wanted audiences to understand. And if they could get some sense of what those stories involved by experiencing them from the inside of a container, then so much the better.

Clare Bayley, writer, THE CONTAINER