The Migrant Shakespeare project: The actor as ‘other’

In March 2021, during a time of loss and longing, the theatre company, Seyyar Kumpanya, under the artistic directorship of Naz Yeni, created a digital project called ‘Migrant Shakespeare’. Seyyar Kumpanya is a collective of Turkish-speaking actors who now, for various reasons, all live and work in and around London. Their project evolved into a sequential performance of ten monologues taken from different Shakespeare plays, each spoken by ten different actors who have English as a second, sometimes third, language. The directorial decision was made to transpose Shakespeare’s characters to the day-to-day contexts that socially and politically transform and define the migrant experience: Caliban becomes a hotel cleaner, King Lear a construction worker, Hamlet a meat packer and Katerina Minola a barmaid, simultaneously subservient while also ironically sarcastic and physically strong. Thus, at one level, all the actors were performing their own migrant identity. In this article my primary aim is to analyse the digital text of the ‘Migrant Shakespeare’ project. Methodologically, I describe the ten performances and record my personal attempt to make meaning within the dialogic relationship between myself as spectator, the author and the migrant actors. Shakespeare often imagined that it is only in faraway places and in displaced realities that we discover other possibilities that exist within ourselves. His plays feature (among many instances) a penniless and homeless old man, King Lear, thrust out into the wilderness, Prospero, the displaced Duke of Milan, who is exiled to an unpopulated isolated island and Prince Hamlet, a privileged young man who is transposed to an unrecognizable world of grief and loss. The migrant is similarly decentred on a daily basis, repeatedly required to redress the balance between old and new identities while being simultaneously present in both. This article attempts to understand how the experience of contemporary migration may be explored through the similar destabilization inherent in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. Furthermore, I argue that the craft of acting mirrors the experience of the migrant. At one level, all actors are ‘foreign’, as their profession requires them to migrate from their individual identity to that of the character they are playing. A working actor is thus always concurrently present within two selves. Consequently, they are polysemic, that is, in performance actors signify the characters they portray, while simultaneously remaining different, functioning human beings. Generally audiences may, or may not, be directed to a meta-theatrical awareness of the actor’s two identities and herein can lie much of the enjoyment and/or meaning of performance. This article concludes that, where ‘Migrant Shakespeare’ is concerned, the spectator is directorially guided to incorporate a personal recognition of the migrant identity or ‘other’ within a reading of the performance text. Audiences are confronted by a strong awareness of the polysemic body of the migrant actor embodying Shakespeare’s often decentred and destabilized characters. I suggest that this process of complex signification destabilizes the text in performance creating new readings and, consequently, suggests a new decentred understanding of the concept of contemporary ‘Britishness’.