If the phrase ‘asylum seeker’ bears any passionate connotations for you, you’d best leave them outside the door of this show. Instead, you should brace yourself for a thoroughly mindbending theatre experience combining slapstick, melodramatic parody, some really moving stories, moody film footage and simply exquisite individual performances from Talia’s actors. You could in fact bring in a telephone book and they will prove to you the notion of making anything sound interesting.

Talking of which, telephone is a kind of centrepiece at 7 Assilon Place and I bet you will never have seen more effective gags involving the communication device. Admittedly, there is a bit of a strange feel to this melange of styles, serious drama and affectation but it is all entirely forgivable considering the subject matter, which for once receives a human and non-patronising treatment.

The refugees are simply shown as perfectly likeable or dislikable individuals rather than a group of people behind a collective noun. And if you have never met any of them, 7 Assilon Place is just around the corner.

Duska Radosavljevic – The Stage

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Biomechanics, a 1920s technique for physically training actors developed by the Russian, Meyerhold, in a play about asylum seekers? Yes. 'Blimey' is what I thought too.

But this is a brilliant exploration of the awful pantomime that human beings are forced to parade in, which we dignify with the name of the asylum system. Once you get past the over-extended bizarreness of the technique, which uses the actor's physicality as a conduit for expressing emotion, you sink into a world of tug-and-pull drama, where a telephone call can literally collapse a character into a heap or lock them into knots of suspense.

The Biomechanics technique finds a wonderful synergy with the subject matter in this play. This is particularly powerful in the asylum interviews scenes. Asylum seekers are made to prostitute and parade themselves, their lives and their stories in front of faceless bureaucrats. Using the Biomechanics technique, Talia Theatre shows us the emotions of characters turned into puppets and put through the wringer of a system that makes them dance - almost literally in the case of one character, Margaret - through a nightmare system of bureaucratic hoops.

The use of multimedia in theatre is often simply an elastoplast covering over lack of imagination and skill. But when Talia Theatre takes us on a journey of human migration through the ages, it is not only moving, but a truly powerful statement about human history and progress.

Shirley Dent – CultureWars

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An exquisite set that unfolds like a jigsaw puzzle to be more than the sum of its parts is the backdrop to this sensitive exploration of the asylum seeker ‘problem’.

Thrown together, Zeppo, Margaret and Minnie cling to and fight each other as they wait in limbo to be granted asylum and delivery from this wretched half-life.

This is a visually stunning production, where the combination of Theatrical Biomechanics, vaudeville and melodrama give the characters a marionette like quality which emphasises their lack of self-determination as their destinies are caught up in the workings of a bureaucratic machine, whose lack of compassion demeans these already damaged individuals. This is a poignant and powerful production that lends an invaluable perspective to this headline grabbing polemic.

CMW – ThreeWeeks

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The List

An expressionistic comedy about refugees sounds in extremely poor taste, not to mention trailing at the back of the queue in the barrel of laughs department. Yet, there’s an incredibly moving power to Talia Theatre’s imaginative, stylistic production. The three protagonists explode out of the revolving, doll’s house set and, through a mix of heightened dialogue, movement and music, fully communicate the issues of acceptance, misplaced hope and despair that surround the asylum conundrum. Apparently, Talia is the only European company to work according to Meyerhold’s Biomechanics. If that sounds as familiar as Hawking’s Brief History of Time, simply be advised that this is fantastically energetic physical theatre, funny, sad and very accessible.

Allan Radcliffe, The List

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