Review: 'The Jungle' stages sensory bombardment in transformed Curran

If you’ve been to the Curran before, even if you’ve been attending shows there your whole life, you won’t recognize the theater during “The Jungle.”

Gone are the grandeur, the tiers of balconies, the soaring ceiling, the chandelier. In their place are flakeboard and the musty smell of sawdust. A warren of makeshift rooms crammed with cots and canned vegetables and bags of rice leads to a transformed playing space — no proscenium stage but a catwalk, no plush seats in the orchestra but backless wooden benches before narrow wooden ledges, on which you’re served chai in a Styrofoam cup.

For audiences closest to the stage at “The Jungle,” that catwalk, designed by Miriam Buether, could serve as a giant communal table in the restaurant of Salar (Ben Turner), an Afghan refugee at a camp in Calais, France. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson wrote the show based on the several months living and making theater in an actual refugee and migrant camp there.

But there’s no settling in for repose at the show, which opened Thursday, April 4 — especially not for audiences abutting the stage. (Patrons also have the option of more traditional, removed and lumbar-supporting seating in the mezzanine.) Directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin, “The Jungle” is a sensory bombardment, a constant stoking of your fight-or-flight response.

A hand drummer might wedge in so close you have to shift your weight so that you don’t get bruised, but you’ll still feel like your flesh helps amplify the drumming. Fifteen-year-old Norullah (Khaled Zahabi), practicing how he’ll smuggle himself via lorry to England, might leap and skid across the stage till he’s centimeters from your face. The chemical smell of burnt firecracker suffuses the air, alerting your nostril linings to danger. Shouts pelt from every direction. Flashlights blind. A gunshot pops.

The show positions you as part of the de facto, ad hoc United Nations-in-miniature that gathers in Salar’s restaurant, representing refugees from Sudan and Eritrea, from Syria and Iran, as they party and fight and debate and support each other, building a system of government and a home out of nothing, out of emergency. How should they allocate tents and prefab housing made of shipping containers? Can they take their own census, to give a more accurate picture of their population than the one the French took? Should they resist when the French government evicts them, then evicts them again? How should they deal with well-meaning but bumbling British interlopers? How do they hold onto a sense of self in permanent impermanence, when the French and the rest of the world won’t regard them as full humans or their camp as a real place?

As the cast brings glistening vulnerability to these life-and-death questions, so do your fellow audience members. Packed in butt cheek to butt cheek, staring you down across the catwalk, their reckoning becomes yours. When one recoils as a bike almost crashes into her, then tries to laugh it off as she braces for the next near-accident, it’s not entertainment or schadenfreude. It could be you. And that’s what the whole show says: It could be you; it almost was.

If the show has any flaw, it’s that it dwells too long on the Brits, who suffer from predictable mercenary foibles and who function as eyes through which a presumed Western, cloistered audience might be able to take in foreign peoples and an unimaginable situation. Why do we need a white lady onstage to listen to a black man’s pain?

In fact, “The Jungle” (which was also the name for the real camp that existed from 2015 to 2016) already speaks perfectly clearly and eloquently from the asylum seekers’ own perspectives. Turner’s speeches as Salar bristle and cut. He has inborn alpha-male confidence that doesn’t need volume to rule. He speaks only after he’s made others wait for him. John Pfumojena as Okot, a 17-year-old refugee from Sudan, speaks of his unspeakable life with forced steadiness. He is a young man fighting to maintain impassivity, and he achieves it. When Beth (Rachel Redford), a British woman, asks him how he survived, Okot says, “We didn’t. This is not us.” His eyes are absence.

If “The Jungle” can get preachy, it earns that right. “Do you think we would be here if they knew?” one character asks of the rest of the world. But what does it mean if we knew, and we still let the Jungle exist and then get razed?

N“The Jungle”: Written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson. Directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin. Through May 19. Two hours, 50 minutes. $25-$165. Curran theater, 445 Geary St., S.F. 415-358-1220. https://sfcurran.com

For the past three weeks, we've been hard at work world building for The Jungle. Today, we welcome THE JUNGLE cast and creative team to Salar's Afghan Cafe. Let #techweek commence! #JungleSF

Posted by Curran on Tuesday, March 19, 2019

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