REVIEW: Invisible, Salisbury Playhouse (From Daily Echo)

REVIEW: Invisible, Salisbury Playhouse

1:33pm Wednesday 25th January 2012 in Stage Reviews By Brendan McCusker

FOR thousands of years people have migrated in search of a better life. In 2000 an estimated 175 million migrants, refugees and asylum seekers were living beyond their homelands.

My own parents were postwar Irish immigrants, my Dad invited into the UK to help reconstruct the Midlands’ bombed cities.

(Ironically, after happily integrating for years my parents had bricks thrown at their windows following the 1974 IRA Birmingham pub bombings – pubs I used to frequent!) Invisible, a gritty new play by Croatian writer Tena Stivicic, explores current migration to the UK – population now 60million and growing – through a range of characters (who conveniently manage to cross The Channel).

Intelligent Lara, convinced that hard work and talent will reward her, works as a cleaner. Morose Anton, a carpenter forced to leave his war-torn village, is a high-rise window cleaner. Distraught Sera, unable to speak English, who is searching for her husband with a useless phone number, ends up in a detention centre.

Seven convincing actors play multiple characters, lighting and sound effects are chillingly atmospheric, the theme uncomfortably prickly.

However, this potentially compelling play loses its focus by including the English character Felix with his troubled marriage and psychiatric problems.

Despite Felix being a businessman with lucrative links with Romania, and an Englishwoman’s US visa interview, these migration counter-balances seem contrived, distracting from the core theme.

Nevertheless this is a thought-provoking new drama about an important contemporary issue.

At Winchester’s Theatre Royal this Friday.