Theatre Centre's Natalie Wilson and writer Paula B. Stanic talk to Naima Khan about their new production Under a Foreign Sky about Kosovan Serb migrants to the UK.
“No hairdressing in my kitchen!” yells actor Miles Yekkini after hissing and huffing, yelling and sliding around on the floor. His words belong somewhere in Paula B. Stanic’s new play, Under a Foreign Sky, a look at three Kosovan Serb migrants to the UK.
The collapse of Yugoslavia in the '90s saw the beginning of Kosovan migration to the UK. By 1999 the refugee council were estimating a further influx of 25,000-30,000 people. It's not clear exactly how true that figure was and it didn't consider the many ethnic groups within the migrating population. At the time, motivations were mostly political and many migrants could be classed as refugees.
Stanic's play addresses a later stage of migration, one with more economic motivations and she looks at a very specific group of people. Under a Foreign Sky naturally has the Kosovan conflict as a distant backdrop but looks at three individuals and the issues they face on arrival.
Yekkini's hissing and huffing might look like a temper tantrum, but he is in fact practising vocal exercises organised by director Natalie Wilson. “There’s nothing worse than that generic Mittel-European accent that everyone can do,” she says of the challenges of depicting people from the Balkans on the London stage. “The key characters are Kosovan Serb, it’s very specific.” But is it important, I wonder, when there’s always a risk of sounding, as Natalie says, “generic”?
After we usurp some office space at the Graeae headquarters where the play is being rehearsed, Paula and Natalie list the reasons that accents in this play in particular are indeed important. “The characters don’t have English as a first language,” says Natalie presenting the linguistics involved as something more than circumstance. “It’s another barrier,” she points out. “It’s another effort they have to make and it can lead to misunderstandings.”
“At one point,” says Paula, “we discussed finding a different convention so they wouldn’t need to use accents.” And Natalie also notes her apprehensions about directing British actors putting on accents for a play written in English. “But they’ve got to speak in an accent if only to differentiate between them and the native English speakers they now have to interact with.”
This isn't about beating us around the head with the notion that the characters we're watching are foreign. Instead, the linguistic issue they’re addressing in their vocal exercises goes beyond accents and takes into account the structure of the language, the image of migrants that comes with it and often, the caricatures we create for them.
The play follows Bojan, a wide-eyed 19 year-old with ambitions of becoming a renowned chef, and Drina, a 14 year-old reunited with her mother who’s been living in the UK for ten years. But the most intriguing character in the play is one we never see: a child trafficked to the UK, missing but still sought after.
“Looking at economic immigrants,” Paula explains, “I could have written about people from all different countries. I did look at people from all over the world in the research process and I found the one thing they all had in common was this issue of child trafficking.”
“And that”, Natalie adds, “is pure economics, and the most naked theme in the play. Economics enables that organised crime to exist, and what’s so disturbing is you don’t have to look very far to find it.”
Under a Foreign Sky runs at Unicorn Theatre from 4th October.
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