The most important play in the West End
The Jungle Playhouse Theatre
Everyone who can see this, should. It’s the most important play in the West End. It’s also the most “non West End” experience in theatreland. The plush (often slightly purposeless) Playhouse has had the mother of all makeovers. Not making it lovelier and more appealing: quite the opposite.
Within a minute you can go from strolling the Embankment – albeit this affluent quarter has its community of dossers – to venturing onto a shavingsstrewn floor in a makeshift café, one meticulously replicated pocket of the former migrant camp outside Calais known as The Jungle.
If there is an immediate sensation caused by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s remarkable debut – drawn from seven months’ first-hand experience of the camp, where they ran a pop-up theatre called “Good Chance” between 2015 and 2016 – it’s one of disorientation. Granted, this is the Jungle sanitised: you won’t be assailed by nasty smells or police batons. But more so than at the Young Vic, where it premiered last year, the hugely ambitious re-creation feels like an act of daring and trespass that completely honours its high-stakes subject.
Whether it’s the deafening sound of trains or the blinding blaze of lights and simulated tear gas when the bulldozers move in, the verisimilitude (achieved by a creative team led by director Stephen Daldry and designer Miriam Buether) is astonishing and too perturbing to be run of the mill immersive “fun”.
Many of the 22-strong company (there’s also a six-year-old Syrian refugee, played by a roster of girls) come from round the world. You can’t see any “joins” in terms of the acting and it’s hard to feel any separateness from the action: when the characters share harrowing stories, communicate a tumult of anger, frustration, anxiety and tenderness, the sense that it’s unfolding in real time is felt on your pulse. Emotional volatility is the order of the day (every night entailing hazardous attempts to head to the UK) and that goes for the volunteers too.
The evening is entertainingly alert to the eccentricity of some of those who made their way across the Channel to help out and it interrogates the value of what they did (the camp was razed in the autumn of 2016). If it was commendable to help sustain this teeming microcosm of civilisation, the do-gooding threatened to consolidate a wretched, dangerous state of affairs.
Whatever your attitude to the issue, you’ll emerge from this shattering experience duly challenged. The human warmth of those we encounter is inspiring – the West End just got a heart transplant. Yet the complexity of analysis running through The Jungle is what also makes it unmissable, vital. What is to be done?