This chapter begins with an ambiguity in terms: mobility, as I have also discussed elsewhere, does not only imply movement—it might well also imply immobility, voluntary or otherwise, and stasis (Angelaki 2017). Mobility itself may be voluntary, or otherwise—and between these two terms, all intermediary grades exist; it is these states, and their associated spaces, that this chapter is concerned with. Mobility, other than chosen, might be imposed, necessary, as in routine, or essential, as in an escape. It can be about transit or about routing, about presence and arrival, as well as about absence and disappearance. Mobility involves different stages, then, of being, trying to be, or failing to be en route—and it does not imply by definition, irrespective of its common associations—that one of these states is more advantageous, or privileged, than another. That which is named ‘mobile’ might be a vehicle, or indeed a body; it might also be their concealment and their endangerment. To remain in place does not imply a condition of passivity or withdrawal, and to be in transit does not suggest that one has aim, or that they may indeed reach their destination.

In fact, the very notion of a ‘destination’ is an ambivalent trope, more subjective and loosely defined than objective and fixed—whether as a place or an idea—and its importance is outperformed by the journey. It may be trite, in a way, to make such an assertion—after all, it has been much repeated across literature, not least in C. P. Cavafy’s emblematic poem “Ithaca” (1911(2009)), which very much identifies the journey itself as the only destination worth striving for. But it is, in my view, imperative, not least in the aftermath of a pandemic, im- and re-mobilisation experience, to consider how we treat mobilities, journeys and destinations today, informed both by the shifting contexts of the first decades of the twenty-first century and the newly redistributed environments that COVID-19 has left to us as legacy, and which have altered our relationships to place, placement and place-ability. When it comes to journeys of all different kinds—physical, temporal, experiential, emotional, mental, historical, private, collective, and, of course, ones that do not involve the traditional concept of the journey at all (as above)—this chapter selects as its case studies three plays. Through an analysis of these, it seeks to capture how the journey as metaphor, contested site and process, desirable and undesirable, as well as, in different ways, as deliverance, even in its failure, is imagined afresh. This involves engaging with dramaturgies that defy assumptions and confound expectations, including moving without moving at all, and remaining static, even in motion.

The transient here is considered as that which is in motion but unaccountable; that whose presence is followed by an absence; that which is public yet invisible. To be transient does not necessarily imply that one moves at speed, though it does suggest that one’s trace fails to land heavily—not because one is inconsequential, but because one is vulnerable. To be transient is to exist, also to vanish; to occupy a space that is physical yet non-verifiable, to uphold a system of organisation of life and privilege, and, at the same time, to move extrinsically and in parallel to that system. The spaces that accommodate transience, are, it follows, also those that produce it: vehicles, containers, unregistered domains, fake addresses, identity records falsified or erased.

This chapter is the outcome of a selection process that has prioritised invisible transports because of the ways in which, playwrights who handle such topics, have served to reveal—in modes visceral, unnerving, disquieting—the systemic endowments for injustices best understood intersectionally: as the outcome of class, race, gender. To fulfil the imperative of considering how patterns of suppression and abuse, performances of privilege against human rights (not least emerging from a COVID-19 period that has further contributed to enclosure and invisibility), and loops of circular transience—including cycles of abuse—proliferate, I have had to side-line plays that examine mobility in other ways. Elsewhere I have discussed modes of largely privileged mobility to argue as to how it does not necessarily imply freedom and how, even when a trope of means, mobility might still be accompanied by dissatisfaction and unhappiness (Angelaki 2017). There are other modes of discussing mobility and transience, of course, and sometimes these can be tropes for investigating political events—for example, Simon Stephens’s play Pornography (2007 (2008)), which has received, rightly, much critical attention, and deals with the 7/7 London bombings; or, from the US, George Brant’s Grounded (2013), which deals with a jaded, PTSD-suffering drone pilot, mobilising an entire war that hinges on precision, sharpness of movement and speed of attack from an entirely immobilised position. There are nuances to movement, to its politics and to its possibilities. While I acknowledge the capacities of texts like the above, such methodologies and thematics do not form the core of this present enquiry.

My concern here is, rather, the ways in which oppression and abuse become institutionally entrenched in how societies are run, how those most vulnerable become enveloped in patterns that further their marginalisation and hiding in plain sight, and how such occurrences are linked to mobility. This chapter, therefore, concentrates on Clare Bayley’s The Container, first staged at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007 in a production directed by Tom Wright, later coming to London’s Young Vic in 2009; Roadkill, for which director Cora Bissett also developed the concept, with a text by Stef Smith, and which, likewise, opened at Edinburgh in 2010, later coming to London’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East (2011), and Rachel De-lahay’s Circles, which premiered at the Birmingham REP directed by Tessa Walker, before transferring to London’s Tricycle (2014). Already, the productions themselves can be seen as transient, even before we delve into their respective stagings, which involve itinerant conditions and non-permanent structures, quite literally in the case of the first two, and dramaturgically in the case of the latter. Movement, then, is part of the very fabric of the plays—but, then, equally, so is stillness, confinement and hindrance from reaching that so longed for destination.

The Container

The play considerably predates what became known as “The Long Summer of Migration” in 2015, reminding us that the main concerns it deals with—illegal migration of extreme precariousness, where no end result is guaranteed and survival is at risk—also long predate their moment of most public eruption. The play even predates one of the definitive moments in migration-focused contemporary playwriting, itself with a strong interspatial focus: Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Schutzbefohlenen (published in English as Charges in 2017). This adaptation of The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus, dealing with the arrival of a group of migrants to a city where they seek shelter, and whose authorities might decide to grant or refuse this, hinges on the ultimate expression of migrant uncertainty: the refugees are both present and unaccounted for, both in transit and at a destination, occupying a space in-between asylum and deportation. Bayley’s play even predates Anders Lustgarten’s Lampedusa (2015), considerably smaller scale but still quite emblematic, whose title foregrounds the very site that, in its in-betweenness, in October 2013 became the final site reached by precarious migrants transferred illegally by sea, as their boats capsized off of the island.

For all its significance, The Container does not, however, predate one of the most impactful pieces of the recent period in European theatre and performance, which is also a staple work in the theatre and migration field: Christoph Schlingensief’s Bitte liebt Österreich (Please Love Austria) (2000). For one week during the Wiener Festwochen (Vienna Festival), the piece formed part of the city centre ecosystem, which, at the same time, it intervened upon, and disrupted. This came at a crucial political junction, when Austrian politics’ right-wing turn became embodied in a coalition that, formed of the conservative (ÖVP) and the far right (FPÖ) parties, led to EU sanctions and public outcry (see, indicatively, Merlingen et al. 2001). It is difficult to imagine a more prominent site for Schlingensief’s piece, which was installed and performed immediately adjacent to Vienna’s iconic Opera house on the Ringstrasse. As the piece was framed at the time:

Amid intense public interest, twelve participants introduced by Schlingensief as asylum-seekers spend one week in a cordoned-off, CCTVed shipping container complex […]. Blue flags representing Austria's far-right populist FPÖ party are hoisted on top of a container.

As onlookers applaud ambiguously, a sign bearing the slogan ‘Ausländer raus’ [‘Foreigners out’] is unveiled and then attached to the container together with the logo of the Kronenzeitung, Austria's biggest-selling tabloid.

Excerpts from speeches by FPÖ chairman Jörg Haider resound across Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz. With clear references to the BIG BROTHER TV show, the Austrian population are asked to phone in and vote out inhabitants […]. Votes can also be cast via the Internet, where Webfreetv broadcasts events from the container live – 24 hours a day for a period of six days.

Every morning at eight o'clock, two residents are ejected from the container to be deported to their native country. The winner can look forward to a cash prize and the prospect, depending on the availability of volunteers, of Austrian citizenship through marriage. (Schlingensief 2000)

It is worth revisiting the framing of the piece at such length to be reminded of how this century began in terms of shifting political ground, but, also, how artistic dissent was framed in a way that still resonates a quarter of a century later. It is worth, also, recollecting that the disruptions to a changing atmosphere and public mood swinging towards extreme conservatism, rightly identified as urgently needed by artists such as Schlingensief, emerged long before a more globally pronounced rhetoric problematising such a turn in voting and politics. As we know now, this turn continued to evolve in spectacular ways, especially over, but far from contained in, the past decade.

Finally, opening in the summer of 2007, Bayley’s play predates the Brexit referendum, which placed migration at the centre of the debate and subsequent vote, by nearly a decade. This is crucial in terms of how the play was already responding to a public feeling that was shifting towards insularity. The text does not only make a comment on migration and the plight of refugees more broadly conceived—it also, and rather pointedly, takes on the UK as a country receiving migrants, given that the refugees being illegally transported share the UK as final destination. The UK migration processing, detention and removal system is, of course, also a major focal point of a play discussed in the previous chapter—Rachel De-lahay’s Routes. If in De-lahay’s play we encounter the conditions that prompt illegal migration, the aftermath of arrival, and the reality of stagnation, in Bayley’s play we are confronted with the radical vulnerability, uncertainty and devastation of the process of illegal transport in itself, as well as with the false allure of a destination framed as the promised land.

One feels, in the container, the movements and shifts that, through the motions of the vehicle, are the only indicators of an outside reality—the bodies of the migrants are set to the rhythm of the motor vehicle that carries, conceals and compromises them. This is our shared spectatorial space, and the non-verbal discourse that establishes our physical grounding and the transport illusion. As the performance journey starts, “The drone of an engine is heard. As the play begins, the lorry is heard to come to a halt” (Bayley 2009, 5–15). It is not long before “The truck starts moving” (Bayley 2009, 5–15), and, as the play progresses, we will experience more sudden shifts: “The lorry jolts and comes to a halt”; “The truck stops again. A few jolts”; and “The container jolts some more. They wait” (Bayley 2009, 15–46).

An audience of the play is likely to have at least encountered reports as to the conditions, entirely contrary to the ideal, that will greet the illegal migrants upon arrival, whether they manage to enter and remain in the country, or not. This is part of the play’s critique and irony, both when it reminds us of the fluidity of national identity and the itinerant nature of privilege, and when, in doing so, it claims it as a power trope, an image that has nothing to do with the reality of the disenfranchised migrant:

ASHA. English people are kind. They welcome people from all over the world

[…]

FATIMA. He [her son, who lives in England] says the Queen is really German. Her husband is Greek. And the government are all Jews or Scottish. So, you see, they understand. (Bayley 2009, 5–15)

There is an additional dimension to the play’s affective devastation: the fact that whether the migrants arrive or not will remain uncertain. To say that Bayley’s play ends on a cliff-hanger does not quite capture its emotional charge, which is accompanied by a physical and mental discomfort exacerbated by the conditions of confinement. But it is accurate to note that the text does end by leaving us wondering what happens next, and pondering on the likely outcome of a transport such as the fictional one we have been a part of—or of other ones, that we may have heard and read about, in the all-too-common incidents of refugees expiring on the way to the promised land:

JEMAL. Shhhh. Maybe they’re putting us in the train now. Keep quiet.

ASHA. How long is the tunnel?

JEMAL. It takes about forty minutes.

ASHA. Forty minutes and then we are in England?

[…]

The container jolts some more. They wait.

AHMAD. We must be on the train now. Do you think we’re on the train?

They wait. Silence.

FATIMA. I think we are on the train now. Soon we will be in England.

Silence.

ASHA. I can’t feel us moving.

FATIMA. Soon our journey will be over.

AHMAD. Are we moving?

ASHA. Are we there? Do you think we have arrived?

Nobody answers.

Slow fade.

The end. (Bayley 2009, 42–46)

As the weight of Bayley’s finale sets in, an immediate implication is that ‘to arrive’ is a very relative term; it does not at all imply a desired destination; it might indicate an endpoint, but this may not be the one that the traveller set out for, especially if, as is the case here, the passenger’s agency is non-existent.

By denying an answer to the question of whether the container has made it onto the train to cross the channel to England, Bayley’s text astutely reminds us that migrants are always in transit. It emphasises that, even though upon exiting the container as spectators we will touch the stable dry land of Edinburgh, or London, or any other site where the container may be installed, in that very moment—and as the enduring product of systemic injustices—many others, unlike us, are on the road. They, unlike us, have no control over their next steps; whereas we are left to recalibrate our actual stativity after the experience of darkness and enclosure, before, eventually, negotiating our way towards that very site that refugees, surviving, traumatised or perishing, are forever striving for: home.

The dialogue quoted above is indicative of the fact that, for all their differences, the migrants forming the set of characters all have in common their anxiety and insecurity. Amongst them, levels of privilege vary; this will also play a role as to who manages to remain on the container through to the end of the play. When the performance begins, there are four individuals in the container: Fatima, described as “Somali woman, forties” and her niece, Asha, “Somali woman, fifteen”; Jemal, “Turkish Kurd, twenties”; and Ahmad, “Afghan man, fifties” (Bayley 2009, 5). When the play is underway, in one of several abrupt stops, Mariam, “Afghan woman, twenties”, also enters (Bayley 2009, 5). Mariam, it comes to be revealed in a conversation between her and Asha during one of the quieter moments in the container while all others are asleep, is pregnant. She is also the one that, having boarded last, is able to provide a location update to the others, who at this stage, have lost all sense of accurate locality. When Mariam boards we are at the very North of Italy, by the French border. It is Mariam who, in her quiet resolve, will also deviate from the thoughts and expectations of others as to the England she expects to encounter, simply, but also tellingly, responding to Asha’s enthusiasm about England with the words “To somewhere safe” when asked where she is headed—as she is, otherwise, uncertain when it comes to a final destination (Bayley 2009, 15–42).

Mariam’s presence in the container, as comes to pass in one of the most unsettling moments of what remains a disquieting experience throughout, is particularly transient; it will last less than that of the others, and it will be laden with even graver uncertainty as to the reaching of any potential destination. The final character of the play is The Agent—the man presenting himself as a go-between, and claiming to care for the migrants’ safe passage all the while employing intimidation and violence tactics to debase those who are most vulnerable even further. Although each person in the container has paid for the ride, The Agent will, at some point, demand even more money to guarantee the continuation of the journey; to persuade, as he notes, the driver, who, being in charge of the vehicle, “knows he has the power” to carry his human cargo further (Bayley 2009, 15–42). Mariam is unable to pay, and no one is, alternatingly, willing or able to cover the additional cost. Mariam is forced to disembark the container, as Asha becomes aggravated, certain of Mariam’s grim fate if she exits. No room for ambiguity has been allowed in any case; as The Agent coarsely puts this moment earlier: “You are refugee woman, you know how to pay” (Bayley 2009, 15–42). Disturbingly, Asha’s words—some of the most poignant in the entire play—begin to ring true. In her earlier conversation with Mariam, she had remarked: “They all complain about this truck. But I like this truck. In this truck we are safe” (Bayley 2009, 15–42). To this, Mariam had responded: “For a while” (Bayley 2009, 15–42). In a context where time and space are as indeterminate and elastic as they are fractured and disjointed, this stretch of so-called safety can be even more short-lived than anticipated.

That there is safety in movement and risk in stativity may well speak to the heart and soul of the individual fleeing violent conditions and entering risk unnameable with the mere hope of survival and of “a future at once utopian and possible” (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 97). Despite differences and origin, this is the state that emerges as the refugee condition. If the references to a welcoming, idealised England are striking in their irony, then the following, delivered by Fatima to Asha in an attempt to quieten her as Mariam, defeated in her efforts to mobilise support, and surrendering to a cruel fate, exits the container, further amplifies this effect:

FATIMA. (In Somali). Is dajji, Asha. (Calm down, Asha.) This is France. This is Europe. Nothing bad will happen to her! (Bayley 2009, 15–42)

But there are many Europes, and Mariam is not, we can deduce, about to experience the kindest one. In the beginning of the play, as the truck stops for Mariam to board, we hear Jemal’s rude response to Fatima’s query as to why the vehicle has halted: “I’m not the fucking tour guide, am I? I don’t fucking know why we’ve stopped” (Bayley 2009, 5–15). This is not a leisure expedition, and, here, the dialogue reminds us how far the precarious migrants’ experience lies from that of the privileged grand tourists, whose Europe was a site of endless wonder, a marvel of culture and access. Even Ahmad, from within the container, expresses a thought that is, in its own way, a performance of privilege when he says “We are not all the same. I should not be travelling like this”, on the basis of his supposed wealth and privilege (Bayley 2009, 5–15). It is on such narratives of mobility and freedom that the myth of Europe as open and traversable, as welcoming and a beacon of all things noble is perpetuated. But the myth, in the reality of multiple-gears European experiences, citizenships and accesses, is contestable. Ahmad is not ‘travelling’—the very word implies a form of agency; he is, rather, being transported, having paid handsomely for the non-privilege of receiving the treatment of commercial goods carried as cargo. This is not a journey through the continent; there are no sights to behold and no leisurely pauses to be taken. Nor is it true that, as Jemal proclaims elsewhere, “We’re all Europeans now” (Bayley 2009, 5–15). Not everyone gets to experience a rite of passage to this so-called European-ness. Mariam’s journey ends here; her narrative will continue beyond the container, as her story merges with those of others whose traces are lost along the way.

The difference between Bayley and Schlingensief’s respective containers lies in the spectatorial relationship to the event, but, also, to the work’s self-framing within a public space, and to the framing of that very space. Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria had a considerable life outside and beyond the container structure, and its legacy endures: it is difficult to imagine more meaningful, resolute and memorable disruptions of the art and life divide, or more affective interspatial fluidities between the real and the staged, between the theatrical and the civic. Schlingensief’s extraordinary piece both opened up to and embodied the interspace. It did so while being creatively groundbreaking and deploying its public installation format to mobilise affect in a most impactful way (Scheer 2018). The Vienna Festival is a heavily subsidised event, both in terms of public and private funding; moreover, the container as a transient, immobilised space associated with cargo and mobility, was installed at a space as public as one might imagine, where a structure like this is most unlikely to be encountered. Means and method, then, combined to accomplish maximum intensity. Perhaps only an installation at Heldenplatz, the site of Thomas Bernhard’s eponymous play (1988), which caused a stir comparable to Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria and a tidal wave of reactions when first staged at the Burgtheater (Austria’s National Theatre, by which it was also commissioned), might have rivalled the choice in terms of impact.

The unbridled aggression with which Bernhard’s Heldenplatz—a staunch, lucid, historicised, caustic and satirical critique of Austria’s difficult past and especially the remnants of Nationalsozialismus—was met was, to an extent, echoed in the reception of Schlingensief’s. There are fascinating artistic legacies here, and, even though Bayley’s container was installed in much less auspicious conditions, and the performance itself was most considerably smaller scale, in terms of treading on such a history, it is not possible, in my view, to consider The Container outside of the realm of prior work such as this mentioned above. There is also the self-lacerating attitude of the piece: as in Bernhard, as in Schlingensief, and, most certainly, also as in Jelinek, it is the ‘home’ culture, the country that is to receive—but not straightforwardly, or even at all, perhaps, welcome—the refugees that is the target of the most severe criticism. Public space accommodates transience: that in political movements and public moods, that of lives rendered precarious and sacrificed to demagogy, whim and circumstance as instigators of xenophobia and violence. Somewhere, that figure, the embattled xénos, remains in transit, arriving, yet never quite being present.

Where Bayley’s play differs substantially from Schlingensief and Jelinek’s work in the subject of migration is that it may, as these prior-mentioned pieces, stage a group, but it primarily concentrates on the individual. Here, we notice the legacies of another artistic narrative: British social realism. During the performance of The Container, conversations take place; we come to meet different characters and their dialogues unfold with a fidelity to the rhythms and forms of ‘real life’ as we might expect to encounter it in any given social-realist dramatic plot and staging context. Despite its significance as a staging concept, The Container—precisely because of its production conditions—was always going to have been a comparatively more limited event in terms of attracting publicity and participant numbers. Subsidy structures between affluent European theatre cultures—such as that of Austria—and the UK remain, after all, very different. Bayley’s work, to attempt an analogy, was not staged at the heart of Covent Garden, on the South Bank, or at Trafalgar Square; comparisons are, therefore, only tenable up to a certain point. Still, London, a global pole of attraction for privileged migrants (most often called ‘expats’), as well as for those seeking a better life and setting out for the British capital under conditions such as those we witness in The Container, and given the currency of migration debates in British public discourse, could certainly have served as a site for a more emphatic staging.

The intimacy factor, however, might have been compromised in such a scenario, and in its play with sound, light and proximity, the affective intensity of The Container hinges precisely on these concerns. From the start, the play between the migrants’ visibility and invisibility looms large; so does the interplay between mobility and stativity, for which the container serves as a both/and structure. The “twenty-eight spectators per performance who sat in close proximity to the performers” became part of the journey—and, so, in a suspension of disbelief, also transient (Rodríguez 2022, 148). For us to enter, the container must collect us; the suspension of disbelief is expected to occur instantly. This is no longer a static entity outside a theatre; this is, rather, transformed by sound and lighting design into an object attached to a vehicle, which has been, and soon will once more be, on the road:

A container, which appears to be empty except for some pallets. The drone of an engine is heard. As the play begins, the lorry is heard to come to a halt. Fatima, Asha, Jemal and Ahmad emerge from their hiding places […]. They whisper. (Bayley 2009, 5-15)

Indeed, a lot of the impact of Bayley’s text is carried through extra-verbal clues. No sooner have we encountered the play’s characters and attempted to acclimatise to its staging conditions and its fictional context, than this is interrupted, reflecting the unpredictable disruptions to which a precarious refugee’s journey is subject:

The doors are opened. The sudden light is dazzling. They all melt back into their hiding places

Mariam enters. (Bayley 2009, 5–15).

The accompanying directions for Mariam’s entrance remind us that it is the full range of senses that is at play, especially in confined spaces of crammed, unhygienic conditions:

She stands, trying to see in the darkness, her hand over her mouth and nose, because of the smell in there. She retches. The doors are closed behind her. (Bayley 2009, 5-15)

Later, we will hear Ahmad complain: “It’s so hot I can’t breathe!” (Bayley 2009, 5–15). Mariam, pregnant and “exhausted”, and now in motion under the worst of conditions, will feel even more unwell; she will vomit, triggering palpable discomfort amongst the characters, and simulating a no less—however built on the imaginary—uncomfortable experience for the spectators (Bayley 2009, 5–15). As theatre scholar Verónica Rodríguez discusses, “the space is only illuminated by torches held by the actors in the dark; heat, smell and claustrophobic conditions that are part of the migrants’ travelling experience become the spectator’s experience as they all sweat, feel, see and smell in the same condensed space in close proximity” (2022, 150). The olfactory plays a role; the respiratory, also: the breath amongst, and the inhaling of the lives of others. As Rodríguez tellingly adds, “the container […] had holes because the actors and the spectators needed to breathe” (2022, 150).

One of the most significant contributions of the play to illegal mobility and precarious migration discourses is its depiction of the interflow between time and space, contributing to a state of mental and physical disorientation. Medical researchers Morton Beiser and Ilene Hyman have engaged with the question of time perception in refugees by considering different stages in the migration process. They propose that “cognitive alteration of time perspective is a strategy for coping with adversity” and, through empirical study, go on to postulate that “[a]lthough time binding is probably natural under ordinary circumstances, time splitting may be a method for coping with adversity” (Beiser and Hyman 1997, 996, 997). Amongst the working hypotheses of the study, the one most directly relevant here due to the specific migration stage with which the play is concerned, is that “[i]f time splitting and cognitive avoidance of the past occur under conditions of adversity, refugees will show more present and future orientation and a greater tendency to split off past, present, and future” as a coping strategy and avoiding a more immediate mental health crisis—namely “major depression” (Beiser and Hyman 1997, 998, 1000). More recently, migration scholars Synnøve Bendixsen and Tomas Hylland Eriksen have argued that “[t]hrough the very act of acquiescent waiting, you show that you have accepted the loss of your control over your own time. Thus, waiting generates vulnerability and humiliation, and its distribution in society is a precise index of power discrepancies” (2018, 92). Moreover, and with striking relevance to the primary focus of this chapter—interspatial mobility—the same scholars note that “[w]aiting is a congested crossroads clogging the route leading from the present to the future, but it is also a somewhat itchy, unpleasant chasm between certainty and uncertainty” (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 93). Beyond this, here we are dealing with the injurious; with a corrosive chasm.

In Bayley’s play, characters are spatiotemporally unmoored, so questions relating to getting their time and place bearings recur, including, when Mariam enters:

MARIAM. How long have you been in here?

Ahmad shrugs.

AHMAD. Is it three days or four?

Jemal nods.

[…]

AHMAD. How long have you been travelling?

MARIAM. I was in Milan for a month. But I left my country three months ago. (Bayley 2009, 5-15)

Or, as the ride continues, at different timepoints:

AHMAD. How much longer will we be in here?

[…]

AHMAD. Let me out of here. Please. Let me get out. So many days in here – I can’t stand it any more! (Bayley 2009, 5–15)

It is important to note the discrepancy and fluctuation concerning time perceptions. We (spectators) have come from the outside; we share time with the actors, who have likely not entered the container too long before we have—but we do not share this time with the characters thar the actors are portraying. And, above all else, we have chosen to be there, and to immerse ourselves in the performance; “enforcing slowness and self-awareness in a cultural world where slow time has become a scarce resource” is, in itself, a trope of our privilege: it is a process of “liberating potential only when it is chosen, which in the case of irregular migrants it is not” (Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen 2018, 99).

But when it comes to the dramaturgical world of the play, time is conceptualised differently: our own time, as spectators, is suspended—parenthetical time and space, as they have opened for and embedded us in the context of the performance, mean that we are now counting time differently. This is not only meant in terms of the performance having a finite duration, and, for the purposes of this, giving way to its specific time measures, but, also, in terms of accepting, and subscribing to the ruse that, for the purposes of this spectatorial experience, and, in the realm of the performance journey, time is infinite and indefinite. This is, reasonably, a further source of spectatorial discomfort and, arguably, anxiety, once added to the spatial discomfort of the performance site in itself:

AHMAD. We don’t know where we are. We could be anywhere. […]

FATIMA. They say when you are in the bottom of a big ship, then you can’t hear nothing. For days and days you hear nothing

JEMAL. Don’t be stupid. When she [Mariam] got on we were where we should be. (Bayley 2009, 15-42)

Here we observe how the spatiotemporal manipulation perpetrated by those in control of the vehicle, The Agent and the driver, and the coordinated gaslighting of the refugees that it produces, is a direct correlative of their emotional anxiety and inability to fully contextualise, working on deductions and assumptions as their panic at being turned back is also displaying itself in physical symptoms. But travel and home coordinates are both elusive, as in slippery; mutable—and illusive, as in a matter of perspective, a story to tell oneself as a narrativisation of the past, and a projection of the future are attempted. Still, “[r]everie is important in assessing one’s current state and future possibilities” though “circumstance may determine access to reverie” (Beiser and Hyman 1997, 1001). We observe this reverie in some of the characters’ visions of what the England promised to them might bring, and its lack in others, who resist its allure.

The right to a home, or even prospects of that home, carry as much currency, as the realisation that, on the basis of the trauma experienced and the conditions procuring this unsafe, and uncertain arrival, no outcome can be taken for granted. And then, in one of the more bracing moments of the play, we observe this manipulation of space, time and perception in action. It is delivered by The Agent—a descriptor with a double semantic sense that points both to the man’s mediation and, by extension, to the fact that, along with the driver, he is the only one with any influence in the process. Here, he coaches the migrants on how to respond to the authorities’ potential questions:

THE AGENT. […] You can’t remember. Ten days ago, you were at home. Now, you are here. That’s all you know. Non-stop travel. (Bayley 2009, 42–46)

The next minutes expedite the end of the play, which, as discussed earlier, closes on a note of utter uncertainty, as the migrants hypothesise that they might be in the Eurotunnel without any tangible indications, much less guarantees, that this might be the case. As Bendixsen and Hylland Eriksen note, “[t]he indefiniteness of liminality […] indicates why the present is not experienced as meaningful, at the same time as it is indeterminate and potentially eternal […] The present intensifies, like waiting at a bus stop for a bus that never arrives” (2018, 100, 103). There is a quality in vehicles, which strengthens their metaphorical intensity; in themselves, whether in their presence or absence, they are measures of time. They are, then, “liminal spaces/states” (Rodríguez 2022, 149). At one point, singing the praises of the British capital, that so longed for destination, Fatima even exclaims: “You can drive in a car for three hours and still you are in London” (Bayley 2009, 5–15). To her, this is a marvel; to those who might experience it on an everyday level, it is a routine of nuisance. But movement makes time, and time is defined by movement. In stillness, in its uncertainty, time and hope draw to a halt. There are all kinds of levels of transit, of mobility, of privilege—one person's traffic is another’s being trafficked. Or, indeed, sometimes that bus arrives—but, as the next sections discuss, this is far from a guarantee of reaching a destination; much less the kind that one may have hoped for.

Roadkill

All texts examined in this chapter carry a considerable degree of challenge, thematically, formally, dramaturgically and in terms of production. As concerns subject matter, affective dramaturgy, difficulty of subject matter, visceral effect and staging logistics, Roadkill arguably stands out. The text is site specific in the sense that it requires a vehicle (bus) and a domestic space (apartment) to be performed; but it is also adaptable, since, as is mentioned in its stage directions,

The original production of Roadkill began on a bus with audience members being driven to the performance flat. The play was also adapted from Edinburgh, where it played originally, to each city and country that the production toured to. […]

Although the female characters are Nigerian in this play, the story is currently so universal that the authors see the play as potentially being adaptable to a different location and ethnicity of migrant/trafficked person in order to reflect the current climate in whichever country it is performed. (Bissett and Smith 22–24)

The play not only has mobility—once more forced, injurious, corrosive—inscribed into the core of its dramaturgy, but, as its creators observe, it is socio-political conditions and catastrophic systemic failures that inscribe this universality and allow it to proliferate in the first instance.

The ‘global’ and ‘mobile’, as we have seen in Elliot and Urry (2010), apply widely as terms in conditions such as those that the play captures, but they are neither a matter of choice nor privilege. In this case study, we are dealing with the most precarious of categories of mobile subjects that Elliot and Urry take on. It is a dominant category of a very different kind to the global business traveller, and yet it also appears to pertain to a global market, in fact to a para-economy functioning alongside the systems of capitalist legitimisation that create and sustain strata of privilege and abuse. The longer quotation here is merited to capture not only the map of trafficking, but, also, the equivocalness of the term ‘network’, far from the exclusive trope of professional esteem and advancement, as it has been appropriated into cross-field labour market jargon:

Nigeria is a major source, transit and destination country of human trafficking [Idemudia and Okoli, 2020]. […] Nigerian women and girls were reportedly the most identified trafficked persons in the European Union (EU) in 2015, […also] identified in over 40 countries in 2017 (USDOS, 2018). The trafficking networks […] range from highly organized and structured criminal organizations to loosely structured informal groups (Carling, 2006). […S]everal intermediary actors play crucial interdependent roles. The first group of actors is the recruiters that contact the potential candidate or her family members to arrange her journey. The second group is the smugglers that facilitate the trans-border movement, which include complicit law enforcement and immigration officials in the home, transit and destination countries. Finally, there is also the madam or pimp who bears the financial costs of transportation and controls the trafficked persons at the destination country [Okojie, 2005]. […] The prevalence of human trafficking in Nigeria is tied to the structural socio-economic and political conditions in the country. Despite the abundance of natural resources […], citizens are unable to derive any meaningful developmental benefits from resource revenues because of the widespread incidence of corruption and revenue mismanagement […]. (Idemudia et al., 2010; Okoli and Idemudia, 2020). (Idemudia et al. 2021, 451–52)

Environmental misappropriation provides us with a fertile metaphor for how the wounds of the land become the wounds of its people and vice versa. Ecologies are disrupted, human and non-human. Mobility is key; the ability to transport and conceal—but also to deliver and channel into a market is a requirement.

As Elliot and Urry note, “[s]ex tourism, forced prostitution and the global sex industry demonstrate how forced mobilities and extensive immobilities are also central to contemporary gender relations. The transnational spread of commercialized sex is a significant component of neo-liberal globalization” (2010, 106, original emphasis). The rules of transport and consumption hinge on the exploitation of resources and on the draining of vulnerable lands and precarious economies by violating human rights and disrupting the very biorhythms of communities, and of entire countries—all peopled by individuals treated as expendable commodities. As others have noted, underlining the excruciating callousness of the operation, in the movement of human prey, market rules apply: “[f]or the transportation stage, an increase in the number of victims may greatly decrease the cost-per-victim associated with setting up and running the informal infrastructure (made up of safe houses and local agents), as well as acquiring the relevant knowledge about visas, trafficking routes and counter-trafficking measures” (Campana 2016, 73).

It serves this discussion to remain within the ‘plain sight’ aspect of human trafficking as a visible, yet strangely unseen and too often non-intercepted kind of crime; it is this very condition that the vehicular dramaturgy of Bissett and Smith’s play highlights. Roadkill invites us to reflect not only on the situations we encounter on the specific bus within the delineated framework of the play, but also on all the collective modes of transport that we make use of, and in whose context we may find ourselves—far from unlikely—in the presence of victims. We are asked to consider, through the embodied experience of the transit interspace, how “victims of trafficking are rendered immobile once they have arrived” (Elliott and Urry 2010, 106). The following is an indication of how such transports operate, and how boundaries between everyday life of utmost routine and criminal activity of the highest order are erased. Here, criminology researcher Paolo Campana reflects on a specific network of events, which provides a representative sample within the context of Nigerian victims of trafficking:

The overall number of actors involved in […] 16 trafficking events is 58, of which 25 are offenders and 33 are victims. On average, each event involved 5.3 offenders. […] The relatively small number of victims trafficked during each journey and the modus operandi adopted during the transportation phase sets this case clearly apart from the large-scale smuggling of migrants between, for example, Northern Africa and the southern coast of Italy. […] We can therefore estimate a yearly trafficking capacity based on the information available: everything else being equal, this capacity would be around 200 victims per year. (2016, 76)

Assessments such as Campana’s are important not only because of the sheer factual intensity of data, but, also, because of the distinction offered concerning transport and scale when it comes to different forms of human trafficking. Such facts are especially significant in terms of understanding operations of smuggling that concern migrants vulnerable to sexual offences against them as part of broader criminal conditions of transport in the illegal migration practices of precarious individuals (as we saw in the previous section).

Discussing audience response to the production of Roadkill, Bissett places the impact of the play within the realm of quotidian life and mobility in the city, in a way that captures the theatre’s capacity of embedding itself within its space and site, a point particularly important given the way in which the play becomes an embodied map of movement and habitation under the most excruciating conditions: an invisible life existing in parallel to that visible; so that, when they do cross over, the effect is revelatory, attacking complacency. “I've been overhearing people talk about the play and about sex trafficking on the bus. I've seen men and women crying on the journey back home. Not a very happy response, but at least I know that it's affecting them deeply”, Bissett mentions (2010). In her review of the original production, Lyn Gardner captures the visceral intensity of the show starting from the unique proxemics created by means of the dramaturgical embedding of the vehicle into the play:

The young black girl in the white dress sitting a few seats away from me on the bus laid on by the Traverse theatre is little more than a child. She is chattering excitedly about the sights […]. Her enthusiasm bubbles over. A few minutes later, […] now in a dingy flat off Leith Walk, we see the same young woman again. Now her white dress is torn and bloody; she shakes. […] Over the next hour, we watch like ghostly voyeurs as Mary's life turns into hell on earth […] It doesn’t feel as if this is just a play. Just as Mary cannot escape from the shuttered basement room […] so Bissett ensures that we cannot escape the appalling truth of Mary’s life, and all the trafficked young women like her. […] She's out there somewhere running for her life. (2010)

Even the way in which Gardner closes her review is angled through the mobility factor: a mobility very different; a matter of life or death.

Mary indeed ends the play by running. She is meant to be moved to another flat, where she will continue to be sexually abused; but, against all odds, she has found a voice, and the strength to leave. So, in the very brief moment of agency, where she steadfastly confronts Martha—her trafficker—with the fact that she chooses to live, to protect her unborn child (conceived in conditions of forced sexual encounters) and to escape this life, Mary opens an interspace of freedom:

Verse

Verse When she leaves the actual flat, we hear the door close. […] Huge video projection of MARY out in the street projected onto back wall, wesee her run out this street, then cross fade into many others, we see the city,familiar yet strange, MARY a tiny little figure running through it, not sure whereshe is running to but not stopping. Music swells. Curtain call. The usher leads the audience back out onto the bus.

(Bissett and Smith 2012, 76–83)

The site is disrupted; for Mary, a brief window opened and closed, leading her, potentially, to a form of salvation. For the audience, whose interspatial experience continues, there is a return to the vehicle that will now restore them to their everyday realities. But the parenthetical space, for which the bus has served as both a device and framework, and which has included the experience in the flat, will, as Bissett and Gardner note, hopefully deliver some form of lasting impact. That the dramaturgical force of the play can render this in different contexts, retaining, in its own mobility, a stable affective core, was corroborated by Sarah Hemming’s review when the play moved to London, where the institutional ‘home’ was Theatre Royal Stratford East (2011). As Hemming observes, “by placing you in their environment” the production cultivates empathy even from the early stages, as the excited young girl, communicating her joy for being in London to fellow passengers, produces “a feeling of deep foreboding settl[ing] on the bus” (2011).

The interspace, then, can endure experientially beyond its practical spatiotemporal coordinates. A similar moment of freedom is perhaps the equally emphatic gesture of the closing of the door by and behind Ibsen’s Nora (A Doll’s House). But for all the debts and dependencies confronting that heroine, Bissett and Smith remind us that compromised agencies and confinements can come in all dimensions—and that some are infinitely more ruinous than others. According to the published playtext, we do not learn what happens next; in that same edition, however, amongst the deleted scenes is also featured a monologue by Mary narrating the events following her escape. We read that “The scene was originally played on the bus returning to the theatre” (Bissett and Smith 2012, 79–81), and in this version of events the bus is commandeered as an active dramaturgical vehicle even more intently. In the version where we do not hear this monologue, however, the bus remains a dramaturgical vehicle, with its interspatial affect far from reduced: it is the site of interaction amongst spectators; of individual and collective reflection.

If we do hear from Mary in the final stretch of our journey, one which intersects with hers, we get to extract information as to the next stage in her own journey, which does not include us: “When I left, I ran. I ran down the street in the rain with bare feet and open eyes. I ran and ran and ran until my feet couldn’t take any more and I couldn’t tell the difference between the rain and my tears” (Bissett and Smith 2012, 81–83). Mary goes on to tell about heading into the first shop she came across; about the police being summoned; about how time has passed, and her pregnancy is advanced; that without documentation, proving her identity or anything else has been difficult. We also hear that she appears to be—along with many others in similar situations—in a structure that purports to take care of her, though she must wait for that very system to process her into a future; that she is in a Church that provides solace, and that her baby is growing. She closes by reminding us that expressions like ‘freedom of movement’ are relative; that far from empowering, at best, or, at worst, platitudes, they can be modes of concealment of the fact that, in the name of ‘movement’, and of the ‘freedom’ of some at the expense of the freedom of others, tragic crimes are committed, and destinations can far from be taken for granted: “I am the woman free from traffic, travelling an unknown road, doing my best to continue, doing my best to exist” (Bissett and Smith 2012, 81–83).

As researchers suggest, “[l]abouring in invisible and disenfranchised labour sectors, many will never be identified as trafficked and receive the assistance they need” (Kiss et al. 2022, 14). Additionally, it is proposed that “[e]ffective prevention will […] need to tackle the systemic conditions that makes [sic] trafficking of female adolescents invisible, profitable and inconsequential for perpetrators” (Kiss et al. 2022, 1). The geographies of freedom relate directly to the ecologies of care, and Mary is far from an aberration as an adolescent who has fallen pregnant as a result of her non-consensual labour as a slave in the illegal sex industry. A related survey has shown that “[m]ore than one in four women became pregnant while trafficked, indicating that maternity services offer an important contact point for identification and care” (Bick et al. 2017, 2). It is, perhaps, the ultimate statement to seal the significance of the play’s title: those eliminated by a brutal force, in transit, prey to the violent entitlement of others, disappeared and unclaimed, reclaiming, against all odds, some form of recognition of their existence; some form of testimonial and a trace of presence. This allows them to survive, rather than to perish, even if left for dead—or made to live as though they were dead. Like its generic, mass noun title reference, so the play is both specific and not in its locationality: site specificity is required, but it is also thrown into disarray through its very own transitoriness, that allows it to become rooted in different contexts.

It is difficult to imagine a more intuitive formal method to indicate that the issue at the heart of the text is both tangible and slippery; both located in certain contexts and alarmingly universal. This is especially important as an interventionist gesture at a time when, still, some years after the play and closer to our present moment than its premiere, “although the majority of citizens are generally aware of what human trafficking is and consider it to be a problem of crime (rather than a broader human rights concern), they do not consider it to be a problem that affects them directly” (Sharapov 2019, 33). Such attitudes appear to endure despite the fact that, as researchers have also argued, “[h]uman trafficking has received increasing global attention since the adoption in 2000 of the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons”, while international measures, campaigns and scholarship have further aimed to heighten awareness (Campana 2016, 68).

According to a UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime) report, close to contemporary with the play’s opening and, we might deduce, capturing the prevailing conditions during the play’s research and development stage, “women play a key role as perpetrators of human trafficking. In Europe, […] women make up a larger share of those convicted for human trafficking offences than for most other forms of crime” (2009). A further, substantial contribution of Roadkill, then, to illuminating a problem that remains shockingly overlooked is the pivotal role of Martha, who rides with the audience on the bus from the early moments, and who is as crucial to the framing of the piece as Mary. As researchers in the field of women offenders in sexual slavery note,

The representation of female traffickers in the data is a paradox within the dominant construction. On the one hand, the stereotypical offender targeted through official accounts is constructed as a predatory male with organized crime connections. On the other hand, the application of the legislation has resulted in females representing over a third of convictions, some of whom are prior trafficked victims. (Broad 2015, 1072)

The toxic circularity is exemplified in the play in different ways: there is, we must imagine, an invisible transport that forever plays out in ways not too dissimilar to those we witness in Roadkill; that involves vulnerable girls and women forever on the road; whose wheels continue to turn because of the actions of those procuring the financial conditions for the movement, and the inactions of those—systemic and individual actors alike—that fail to intercept them. The play hints at, but does not show us one of the most crucial stages in Mary’s journey; the aftermath of her abuse; her methods of surviving trauma. The fact that the play begins and ends by situating its spectators also as passengers on a moving vehicle contributes a major artistic stride to the elucidation of an elusive issue that is even named after a type of movement and mobility: traffic. In so doing, the piece makes the intangible tangible and renders the vague and transient as embodied and located. ‘Human traffic’, then, is not an empty signifier, but a way of being together, and of sharing space; it is a state that most audience members are unlikely to experience at the darkest end of its semantic spectrum, but of which they can momentarily partake. In that interspatial moment, agency is heightened.

Circles

Cities come with complex spatial and emotional geographies and Rachel De-lahay has highlighted these states in both Routes and Circles. Although it can be claimed that all plays bear a special bond to the theatre that originates them, in this case this is especially accentuated given that the REP is Birmingham’s most emblematic theatre and, especially, that De-lahay’s play takes place in this very city, which becomes its notional set as it also provides the thematic canvas. Beyond a backdrop, the city is a presence and force at least equal to that of any character, and the play proves that environments are at least as powerful as human agents, if not more. The play presents the city as vast; familiar and unknowable at the same time. Its borderlines are long drawn up on the map, and, still, the actors engaging with the city keep reinscribing them through movement that may often repeat, but is not quite the same.

De-lahay stages intuitively, but does not romanticise Birmingham—Britain’s second, and, many would agree, embattled second city that does not enjoy quite the same flattering image as other urban centres of comparable or slightly smaller scale across the country. Another element that renders the play significant is that, unlike the oft-repeated idyl of the car, the lone rider, or the joyride through which we come to be introduced and guided through places and stories in many of the visual and/or fictional narratives that we encounter, in this case, it is a different type of vehicle that captures the imagination: the bus. Unlike its more exclusive counterpart, the car, individualised and adapted to its owner’s identity and needs—even the contours of their very body—the bus leaves no margin for individuation. It is shared by default, an organum of collective transport, serving the many but unlikely to be considered as a trope of singularity by anyone. This is also where the ingenuity of De-lahay’s play lies: in that she infuses emotionalism into that, which does not appear to invite, much less encourage it; that she makes private and personal that which is public, and shared; that she navigates the city’s unwieldy environment through the only means that is respectful of that environment, that does not burden, but that relieves its atmospheric pressures, and, also, it would appear, those of its people: collective transport. In the best of plays, binaries of private and public are undermined in multiple ways dramaturgically to evidence that open space belongs to one, as much as to another; and, that it accommodates and is determined by, but, also, exists—and continues—irrespective of human agents, whose transience is superseded by the permanence of site. De-lahay’s play, then, mobilises this transience as a dramaturgical trope, and finds the perfect vehicle—literally and metaphorically—for it: Birmingham’s number eleven bus.

Histories, individual and collective, are important—essential to an understanding of how they contribute to deepening the impact of fiction. In this case, it serves to probe the importance of the number eleven bus to Birmingham, so as to contextualise its presence and plot-driving agency in Circles. A bus is, of course, steered by a driver on a route established by the authorities—but it acquires a life of its own as image and symbol, standing in for something greater than the human agents that determine its route; it becomes iconic in its own right, an intimate part of the city’s ecology, a traverser and producer of its scape. Starting in 1926, the number eleven bus has run for almost a century—a vital part of the city’s biorhythm, witness and record to its immense changes and veritable touchstones, an affirmation of its local identity (Cardwell 2021). In summer 2021, the service, which has been distinctive for its circular route extending at a 25-mile radius that rendered it amongst the longest urban bus itineraries in Europe, was split into shorter routes, the outcome of roadworks at the city’s Northern edge that led to severe traffic, delays and unreliable service (Cardwell 2021). Such narratives of congestion on the roads of Birmingham are not uncommon; what is, are accounts of the cityscape—and its iconic bus—that are idealising and even idyllic:

Route 11 comes in two flavours: 11A (anticlockwise) or 11C (clockwise), each affording two hours or more of orbital delight as the bus circumnavigates the heart of the city known for chocolate, custard, commerce and culture. Route 11 never touches the centre of Birmingham nor the city boundary, instead maintaining a creative tension between the two as it tracks a circular trail through the suburbs. Culture comes in many guises in modern Birmingham and Route 11 touches them all. […] This is a provocative orbit through Birmingham’s edgy and neglected territories, a journey that plunges through deepest Yardley and distant Handsworth before returning inexorably and inevitably to the little Utopia that is Bournville. (Gardner 2011)

Reports of the precise duration of the route vary across different sources, with a two-hour duration emerging as the minimum standard; in De-lahay’s play, one character makes a precise statement as to the route’s duration: “[t]wo hours, twenty-five minutes” (2014, 40).

The symbolic and embodied significance of the route and the bus itself to the city’s ecology was emphasised when, after a major political event, the Brexit referendum vote, the BBC turned to number eleven bus passengers to capture the pulse of the city, conducting interviews on the vehicle. Birmingham had been one of the most tightly fought votes of the referendum, producing a ‘Leave’ result (Stewart 2019). In a major transitional moment for the UK, arguably capturing the different approaches to internationalism and to ecologies of co-existence more than any other in recent history, the number eleven bus emerged as the ultimate interspace. As the accompanying text to the video document notes, “[t]he number 11 bus takes two and a half hours to travel the city… passing through areas that voted Leave and ones that voted Remain” (Stewart 2019). The tension ground is laid out bare five years after the premiere of De-lahay’s play and three years after the vote, registering fatigue as different lives move within and compose the diverse landscape of the city, evidencing the playwright’s capacity of identifying the transitory site as a space in its own right, worthy of documentation and artistic representation.

Reviewing Circles as part of its subsequent Tricycle run, critics commented that “[h]ome here is a metaphorical prison, peopled by failures and policed by mothers” (Sierz 2014). The need to escape, if only to be rotated around the familiar site of belonging and disappointment and returned to the same site of domestic grievance, emerges vividly. The everywhere and nowhere of the bus becomes the only destination, a means and purpose all unto itself. As is additionally noted, the text “shows clearly and forcefully the cycles of violence in both personal relationships and in the wider society” (Sierz 2014), and, I might concur, the grounds on which these play out. The vehicle, therefore, becomes both the set and dramaturgical device for the story. The same reviewer comments that “[o]n this trip to nowhere the stories of violence, and tales of stabbings, begin to suck the characters into another kind of viciousness. Gradually, the ripples of violent incidents spread out until all the characters are tainted in some way” (Sierz 2014). Circles within circles begin to open as the same journey—but differently played out, enhanced by each encounter—unfolds and the play’s plot develops.

The violence observed in the above commentary, and which another reviewer, reflecting on the Birmingham REP production, describes as “victims of domestic abuse […] becom[ing] trapped in a carapace of self-loathing” (Hickling 2014), with loops repeating, refers to the parallel plot unfolding on the bus. In its opening stage direction, De-lahay’s text positions its action firmly in Birmingham, noting: “We’re either on the top deck of the No. 11 bus or in the living room of a two-up, two-down terrace house”, while “Two moveable benches represent bus seats and a home sofa” (2014, 14). There are key pieces of information contained here: that irrespective of subsequent productions, and although the play itself is an itinerant creative entity, it is always rooted in one specific locality; that the attention that the playwright pays to the city as an ecosystem for the plot of the play through its specific scape that both conditions and is conditioned by the action, is a priority; that the life of the bus is set in parallel to domestic life, as the vehicle accommodates temporarily, and perhaps even shelters, but does not provide a home as such; it only offers passing relief from it. Moreover, De-lahay’s directions immediately implicate the audience: the first person plural is crucial. We, the community of spectators, whose own local community may or may not be the city of Birmingham depending on where we are encountering the play, are, for the purposes of the narrative, also ‘located’ in Birmingham; and we are also embarking on a journey across these characters’ environments and experiences, as they take us along for a ride.

The collectivity of public transport, De-lahay reminds us, is, for all its potential awkwardness and undesirability, a component of everyday lives and, as such, carries agency, not only stalling action as it holds bodies in situ but also catalysing it, on these same grounds. The locations that De-lahay specifies are the ones that house the trauma of abuse, even if experienced indirectly, and of chronic systemic inequalities, embedded in the tissue of everyday life performances, and a motivation for seeking escape, however in passing. Whether we are dealing with fixed or mobile sites, the text flirts closely with temporariness and permanence, which it views as a non-binary, the one forever producing the other. The very fact that it is the same objects on set that flexibly serve to represent both spaces—the bus and the home—and the flow between them suggests this interrelationship.

The two spaces intersect more explicitly at the end of the play when the crossover character, fifteen-year-old Demi, enters the house of Phyllis, her grandmother, also finding her mother, Angela (Phyllis’s daughter) there. Demi has finally left the bus, both literally and metaphorically. It would appear that she has done so having fulfilled a mission, not at all an aimless rider killing time, as we might initially assume. Demi’s time on the bus has served two purposes: to avoid the abuse that her mother sustains at home at the hands of her partner (Demi’s stepfather), and to strike up a friendship with a boy one year older than her, Malachi, recently a habitual commuter on the bus on account of his car being repaired. We are given this information as part of a call that Malachi is having when we first encounter him, riding the bus, when he and Demi meet—she is seated some rows in front of him. On his call, Malachi also mentions Bullring. Birmingham’s main shopping centre and, arguably, a core part of the urban biorhythm, this is not the only site to be namechecked in the play; several others—from shops and schools, to neighbourhoods and suburbs—follow. But the significance of Bullring is considerable: in itself indicating a circular shape, and, by the etymology of its name and its commercial function, a site not only of recurring visitation loop but also of encounter, it also opens and closes the main circle of events in the play, being mentioned, once more, towards the finale. Here, Malachi, having grown familiar with Demi through their repeat encounters on the bus, narrates to her an incident of how, as a favour to his cousin, and with the rationale of protecting his honour as part of a retaliation process towards a group that had targeted him, he was complicit in an attack that involved luring an old acquaintance to the city centre, where he would be confronted by a group of youths. The event escalated into violence—and a stabbing. It would appear that the elusive boyfriend that Demi refers to in her conversations with Malachi in fact exists—and is, as it is eventually revealed, that same person.

In the space of a week, Malachi’s car remains unfixed; Demi has made an acquaintance that she has cultivated into something bordering a romantic beginning; and an encounter has been arranged, on the site of the bus, where, Demi, speaking to Malachi, ensures that he remains on board for that precise moment when her boyfriend and his friends will enter to confront him. The outcome of this encounter, which will take place in transient space, on shifting ground, and will rewrite the narrative of the bus in the play from ‘safe’ space away from dreary lives and violent homes to a site of danger and exposure, is unknown to us. When, in the final scene of the play, Demi visits her grandmother, Malachi’s narrative does not continue. What has happened to him remains uncertain, but what does appear certain, despite the bus opening a parenthetical space in Demi’s life on that same week that her mother opens the same parenthetical space in hers, deciding to walk away from her partner and from domestic violence, is that the cycle of violence will likely continue. As Demi makes a plea to her mother for them to return home, it is implied that, despite the interval, the pull of the site that exercises control, the permanent structure that embodies the force of gravity of systemic injustice, will prevail. The interval, then, has already been the event. We have heard, earlier, Angela confront Phyllis with “I don’t want her [Demi] here in this house with you. You’re polluted. You’ll infect her […]... you’re not ‘safe’” (De-lahay 2014, 46–48). The reference is to Phyllis’s own tolerance of domestic violence, and what, to Angela’s eyes, is likely to have been a tacit perpetuation of the motif that, through this behaviour, has resulted in a pattern that she herself is now reproducing. Once more it emerges that the bus has been the only ‘safe’ space for Demi—but that space is transient, and its disruptive, centrifugal pull is not stronger than the centripetal force of the ‘home’.

As we have seen in Urry, mobilities are profoundly classed; moreover, they are not only an expression of contemporary societies, but also a constitutive factor of these. Discussing how spatiality frames the human experience, including as concerns metaphor—a consideration directly relevant to the title of De-lahay’s play, which, as previously, refers to the bus route as much as to behavioural loops—Urry considers nomadism and references Rosi Braidotti (Urry 2000, 28, Braidotti 1994). “[M]obilities, as both metaphor and as process, are at the heart of social life”, notes Urry (2000, 49). Nomadism might be linked to longer itineraries, to distances greater than those covered in De-lahay’s text. But, I argue, the characterisation also applies to the play’s young protagonists, who are navigating their city while also navigating an age of transition in themselves, both drawing on experience of the cityscape and discovering as they make their way on the bus. Let us consider, for example, Malachi’s so-called tour of Birmingham, where he reacts with surprise to Demi’s lack of familiarity with certain parts of the city—an unfamiliarity that is strange for a wanderer like her, and which, given the ultimate revelation of the play as to her purpose, also functions as a precursor.

We have seen previously the concept of the tour guide being engaged with in The Container in a critique that reveals it as trope of privilege; the kind of service that a disadvantaged subject does not have access to. The number eleven bus in Circles serves as the means through which transient observation can take place; a non-tourist tour of a city that is revealed through intimacy but with no sentimentalism, at the same time as it is shown that the bus serves as a transporting device, but that the idyl is gone. That is, there is no lust to see a place or to engage with the surroundings, because they are not awe-inspiring, or even attractive as such. Once more the concept of the grand tour is rendered null and void—if not a relic, then, at least, the trope of those privileged enough to have a choice. Malachi’s tone here captures the sentiment:

I’ll give you [Demi] your very own tour guide. [Putting on a voice.] On the right-hand side we have Handsworth cricket ground. A very popular resort in summer, famous for its well-kept grass and West Indian food kitchen on the side.

[…]

Venture there at this hour mind and you’re more likely to find crack addicts and runaways, along with one Rasta named Bob who reckons he’s training for the Olympics.

Over to the left we have the student halls for UCE. A perfect selection of our future doctors, lawyers and bankers. If you look carefully you can probably see them philosophising away over herbal medicines in the back seat of that tinted-out Corsa.

As we continue down the hill we head towards the shopping destination of the rich and famous. Our very own ‘ONE STOP’. You want it? ONE STOP has it. All under the one roof! (De-lahay 2014, 32-35)

Urry references Braidotti’s “‘special affection for the places of transit that go with travelling: stations and airport lounges, trams, shuttle buses and check-in areas. In between zones where all ties are suspended and time stretched to a sort of continuous present’” (2000, 28, Braidotti 1994). In Circles, the corresponding site would be the bus stop or the depot; but the circularity of the route that De-lahay focuses on, which troubles the meaning of a clear endpoint, or destination, as well as the embodied usage of the bus by Demi and Malachi, which suspends its pure utilitarianism for the purposes of an elastic time furnished by the public transport vehicle that serves as interspace of encounter, renders it both the space and means of travelling, and of its own suspension. The durationality experienced by characters and audience, or, no less significantly, its very impression (vis-à-vis the limited duration of the play itself), further serves this effect.

Urry discusses extensively the emergence of mass transport, historicising its impact at the level of the organisation of everyday lives (e.g. concentrating on rail networks) (2000, 49–76), as well as the resulting relationship between mobility and environment. Part of the analysis juxtaposes this with the car’s own transformative effects:

car drivers are located within a place of dwelling that insulates them from the environment that they pass through. The sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures and smells of the city […] are reduced to the two-dimensional view through the car windscreen, something prefigured by railway journeys of the nineteenth century. The environment beyond the windscreen is an alien other […]. (2000, 63)

The hypothesis is tested in Circles: Malachi only rides the bus because his car is in the garage; still, his knowledge of the city and the state of being attuned to it is such that proves that he is far from desensitised to his environment. Driving and riding, respectively, are indeed indicative of class and status: in early conversations, Demi dismisses Malachi by saying: “Pedestrians aren’t my type” (De-lahay 2014, 19). Cars themselves, wherever they are mentioned in the play, stand metonymically for their owners, and for a gendered power performed excessively. Demi’s boyfriend drives “A Mini Cooper S, in gunmetal, with the black roof”, as she emphatically notes (De-lahay 2014, 20). Malachi escalates the antagonism, if only as a way to keep talking to Demi, and to present himself as a worthy prospect. He asks: “That not sting? […] Knowing your man’s driving a Mini Cooper S with the black roof thingy and yet you still have to catch the bus!” (De-lahay 2014, 20). The car is the desired object, the measure of worth; the bus is diminishing—or so it would appear, until Demi reclaims it as a space, and as part of her self-performance: “I’m an independent woman. I don’t need no man to pick me up or drop me off no place” (De-lahay 2014, 20).

Elsewhere, and with considerable dramatic irony given that Malachi is unaware both of the violence awaiting him at the hands of Demi’s boyfriend and of the histories of domestic violence inscribed against the women in her family, Malachi teases Demi “Don’t snap at me’cause you’re getting beaten by your Mini-Cooper-driving boyfriend” (De-lahay 2014, 35–37). The bus, other than a space of peace and community, versus a site of gender performance of machismo and competition, is also formative in terms of Demi claiming access to the collective and, as it were, taking up public space as a young woman. We root for the agency that the bus affords her, and that she affords the bus, a temporary but significant carrier of her selfhood-in-formation, a vehicle literally and metaphorically, to be true. There is, of course, also the alternative deduction, which is that her boyfriend is recovering from a stabbing—so he is not in a position to drive. Demi’s access to the city is now other; she observes more sites (if not quite sights, as above) and registers these through fresh eyes, unlimited by the isolationist conditioning of the car.

Urry expands upon the problematics of cars, the spaces they imply, and the ways in which they are reciprocally anticipated by spaces. By reference to Marc Augé, he delves into “car-only environments – the quintessential non-places of super modernity”, adding that “[s]uch car-environments or non-places are neither nor rural, local nor cosmopolitan. They are sites of pure mobility […]” (2000, 193). Such is the fundamental difference between the collective and individual vehicle: that the former connects, whereas the other separates. But there are intricacies in the pattern, and sites not categorisable under this neither/nor hypothesis, because they are both/and: both intended to be inhabited and peopled, and remote and unreachable, except by a vehicle that takes on a tremendous route, almost disproportionate to a city’s standard contours (let us remind ourselves the number eleven’s erstwhile status as the longest bus route in Europe). The bus, then, and the peri-sites that it traverses in the city, are not non-places: they are interspaces that both accommodate and transport; that both invite a dweller and do not yield to their access needs.

Urry also develops the concept of ‘dwelling’ proceeding from Martin Heidegger, noting that “contemporary forms of dwelling almost always involve direct forms of mobility”, with “certain components of such mobilities, such as maps, cars, trains, paths, computers […] powerfully reconstruct[ing] the relations of belonging and travelling” (2000, 132). Continuing to engage with Heidegger (here the concept of “the bridge”), Urry proposes that “people dwell in and through being both at home and away, through the dialectic of roots and routes” (2000 132–33). This latter dialectic becomes corporeally performed in Circles, where we see it in action. The city carries its stativity, and “remain[s] heavy with time” (Urry 2000, 139), however much it is seen in motion.

De-lahay’s characters are both mobile and fixed; both on their way, and deeply entrenched in their context. The city’s weight compels as becomes obvious in their engagements with its scape throughout, and not least when Demi recollects, upon encountering a familiar spot:

DEMI. Ha! Look! My leisure centre! You see those swimming baths over there? That’s where I had my first kiss.

[…]

DEMI. It’s closed down now. They’re rebuilding it. Do you know a kid drowned in there? Slipped and banged his head on the top diving board before falling off. Can you imagine that? Ridiculous. Like something from an Ian McEwan book.

[…]

DEMI. But imagine, something awful like that happens and all memories can be erased with a clean slate. Fresh start. It’s perfect. (De-lahay 2014, 48-51)

Spaces regenerate and cities continue, but they build upon their pasts; the layering, as we see from Demi’s narration, does not so much erase as it augments these histories. The bus itself is a historical witness of transitions, retaining the inner life of the city. Then, the passenger as witness and observing agent—here Demi—is also a record, with the invisible flow, the soft space between site and observer, the locus of memory as an interspatial and cross-temporal interconnector. The only possibility of escape from these narratives of the past of places and of past selves is transience: movement that carries forth, even without delivering onwards.

Demi and Malachi live (in) their city, while also being forever transported around and away from it. Circles performs this both/and in mobility in action. “[M]obility systems are organized around the processes that circulate people, objects and information at various spatial ranges and speeds. In any society, there will tend to be a dominant process of circulation” write Elliott and Urry (2010, 19). Here, also, is the significance of the way in which De-lahay imagines the interspace of the number eleven bus: the vehicle both operates as part of its prescribed network circularity, and is used by the agents, Demi and Malachi, that do not determine its route, but that effectuate its function—an interjection, a pause, a precipitation of events; ultimately, an encounter beyond the realm of linearities—in a disruptive way. They both make use of, and intervene against the vehicle’s anticipated performance, staging, in its temporal crevices, an alternative series of moments.

Conclusion

This chapter has concentrated on three plays: Clare Bayley’s The Container, Cora Bissett and Stef Smith’s Roadkill, and Rachel De-lahay’s Circles. The shared space of the three plays is shifting ground: for each of them, even though they also take place in moments of fixity and grounded site specificity, it is a vehicle and its resulting movement that becomes the strongest plot pivot and distinguishing element. As this chapter has shown, when it comes to engaged spectatorship, all plays invite us along a difficult ride: the sights include vast darkness and human rights violations under the guise of a better life, one that has been paid for handsomely, with no guarantee of deliverance or delivery, as in The Container. The sights also include the darker corners of familiar cities, where a destination is eventually reached, one that reveals to us that our moments of collective transport transience may well be shared with human slaves, and traffickers—and that our quotidian routines of travel and traversal of a city may also well be the defining moments of a precarious individual’s own life—as in Roadkill. The sights, no less, might include cities that never move, rooted in their spaces, but that forever proliferate, as in a loop, with images generated through the window and windshield of the bus, as in a View-Master, reproducing, and replicating, histories of violence moving cyclically—as in Circles.

These plays, and this chapter, have revealed that the vehicle is the interspace in which communities meet, gather and share, sometimes in ways that are mundane; sometimes in ways that are tentative; while, at other times, in ways that are threatening. The plays discussed employ the mobile interspace as the schema through which to query which communities, precisely, we are talking about; how these come to be constituted on uneven structures of privilege; how public space, and its corresponding transport, are accessible, or not; and how such space is, in fact, signposted and mapped by the rights of some to experience it freely, and by the ways in which others are kept contained, at a distance, observing but not accessing; being both within and without at the same time—whether we talk about space or authority. The speed of movement disorientates—and the ecologies of mobility, contributing to the broader ecologies of the environments that we call our cities, depend on the collective looking, rather than the mere gazing; however tempting it may be to deflect—to direct the eyes beyond the bus window, beyond the darkness of the container, out onto the impersonal transitoriness of the street, that which is both ours, and not.