In 1932, when Artistic Director Amit Lahav’s grandmother Leah was a child, she walked right across Yemen and onto a boat for Palestine to flee persecution. That inspired his creation of this Gecko production, devised with its multinational performers, on the theme of migration. It is a powerful piece of physical theatre that could not be more timely.
It features two groups. One of them has proper papers and makes the challenging journey safely to a new home with the warmth of a fire and a television, though even they find themselves forced to move on again. The other is less fortunate and not all will make it. They become part of a collage of journeys rather than a direct narrative, and it is presented through image and movement rather than dialogue. Kin’s characters speak in a medley of languages; sometimes it seems an amalgam. You sometimes recognise individual phrases, but are fully occupied trying not to miss anything, as scenes emerge from a darkness that may be symbolic but everything does seem to happen at night.
Kin starts with what at first seems a village festival, a circle dance breaking up into tipsy revelling, but the participants aren’t villages in national costume but a gathering of men who will be seen later as border guards, the same wherever the frontier.
There are guards who paint backs with a yellow stripe recalling the yellow stars of the Nazis, and Holocaust generations are also remembered in dismembered puppets. While neatly suited blondes sail through barriers, ethnic costume meets savagery. Later, whitewashed faces and white ties suggest forced assimilation, giving up native identity.
Though there are many poignant individual moments, it is the repetition of rejection, abuse and violence that becomes the defining image. The desperation and despair they produce is countered by a determination to get through. A red glow behind them may be a burned village or a war, but when one group clambers up on stage from below (have these refugees swum a river?), the sky becomes sunny and there is joyful celebration.
A blue background with a ripple effect has a different story and when everyone seems to be wearing lifejackets things become very close to home.
Dave Price’s music, combined with Mark Melville’s sound makes a great contribution to the production’s impact whether quoting ethnic folk tunes, reflecting klezmer style, offering clap-along rhythms, keening or operatic richness it provides an emotional support that matches the vigorous style of the movement, while Chris Swain’s lighting picks out vignettes from the darkness.
Finally, the cast identify themselves, say where they actually come from. Like them, almost everyone (especially those in a London audience) has come from somewhere else has been a migrant, possibly a refugee or within their family history. In Kin, its performers offer their personal response to human migration that emphasises refugees’ lives and produce 90 minutes of effective and affective theatre.