A Caribbean politician, an English racist, and a Home Office mandarin all take to the stage in this drama rooted in the Windrush scandal.
Rodreguez King-Dorset plays all three men in this 90-minute self-penned play, which draws on the story of at least 83 people wrongly deported in the 2010s, decades after arriving in Britain to help rebuild the country after the second world war.
Part of the Windrush generation, named after the most famous of the vessels that brought the immigrants to the UK from the Caribbean, their lives and their families were torn apart when the government accused them of being in the country illegally because of a lack of documentation. This despite the fact that none was issued at the time of their arrival, and that the Home Office had itself destroyed landing cards that might have proved their case a few years previously.
King-Dorset gives a commanding and unrelenting performance, switching between speeches given on the same day by three men connected by the scandal: Marcus Ramsay, a fiery Caribbean politician, addressing a 100,000 strong crowd in Whitehall; Trevor Smith, the leader of the England for the English party slurring through a presentation to 300 followers in a London working men’s club; and Charles Williams, a buttoned-up Home Office civil service giving evidence to a House of Commons select committee.
Their stories inevitably collide – the secret of the title – in a twist that is not entirely believable, and not particular necessary. The truth of what happened, and the complacency and cruelty of the British state in its actions, is shocking enough without embellishment.
Ramsay’s tub-thumping politician and clipped voice civil servant are the strongest portrayals; Smith is a less convincing character (partly due to design choices that include a chair and decanter that would make for a peculiarly swanky working men’s club backroom). But these are quibbles.
It is an impressive feat and a necessary reminder that quiet bureaucracy can be just as dangerous as outwardly vile rhetoric – as Smith puts it “they just need to be more subtle”.
- The Windrush Secret was at Norwich Playhouse on 31 October 2024.
