Public images of refugees are dominated by politicians who rarely welcome them or show much interest in the reasons why they are refugees. That is not a surprise given the UK’s historic responsibility for causing climate change that is wrecking the countries some people are fleeing or their continuing destabilisation of countries whose resources they are grabbing
Tender, performed by young people from Albania, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Iraq, gives a human face to the friendships and everyday difficulties faced by refugees in the UK. They open the performance by briefly introducing themselves in their first language.
The story centres on a student who is missing college class. His classmates, who are also refugees, become concerned since he is usually such an able student who even helps others with their homework. As they try to find him, the play lets us see something of their lives, from the woman (Klevina Moriqi) who has been “docked” money from a job for no good reason to the anxieties of a woman (Sara Zeus) sitting alone in a wooded area wondering if she has caused him to disappear.
There are flashbacks to the selling of land and property to afford the cost of an escape from danger and the boats that might have been used in a journey.
When they come across a birthday card congratulating him on his 18th birthday, they realise he will no longer have the support of a social worker. He will also be treated differently as an adult. Subsequently, they discover that he has been taken to a detention centre, his belongings left behind in the room he stayed.
This compassionate and thoughtful sixty-minute opportunity to hear the voices of refugees always held the attention of the audience, most of whom stood to applaud at the end.
The actors finish with the poem Tender, a word that can refer to money, to a small boat and in the final words to the children who often alone risked a terrible journey in search of safety:
“Tender
A word for young
Soft. Not fully made
Too young to leave our families
But we did. “