Fit for Purpose

It has taken writer Catherine O’Shea four years to get everything together for this heart-wrenching case study of a doomed asylum attempt at the UK border. Pivoting on an incident that took place last year, in which fifty asylum seekers went on hunger strike in Yarl’s Wood detention centre, Fit for Purpose takes a look at the system that processes refugees and decides whether or not they should be sent back to the country from which they have fled.

At the heart of the play is the human drama of a mother and daughter who have arrived exhausted at Britain’s doors after a treacherous escape from Somalia. With no papers, Aruna and Kaela’s fate lies entirely in the hands of the British bureaucracy. In the lifeless handling centre, they have benches for beds and little more than the memories of their past to dwell on, but 14-year-old Kaela must not know of her mother’s experiences and the fragility of their situation.

Antoinette Tagoe is utterly beguiling as the world-weary mother, drawing feebly on her last reserves of energy to fend off the hopelessness from her oblivious daughter. The supporting characters often come across as pantomimic in comparison, with a particularly low-brow double act from the hardened warden (“you have to shout, it’s the only language they understand”) and the new recruit written all too casually into the play to provide the voice of reason. While O’Shea’s extensive research into the system comes through in the variety of dynamics portrayed—the case worker’s targets, the interpreter’s personal ethics—more depth of character wouldn’t have gone amiss.