The Container

At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, The Guardian and the BBC published separate interactive simulators online in which readers faced a handful of the bewildering decisions refugees had to make as they fled. Fair warning: The Container is something like that—minus any element of choice and the aesthetic distance of looking at an unfolding humanitarian disaster through a screen. Clare Bayley’s 2007 drama predates the Syrian crisis; in it, an Afghan widow, two Somali women and two Kurdish men are desperate to reach England to seek asylum. In this immersive Burning Coal Theatre Company and CAM Raleigh co-production, you’ll join them in their plight when you enter an industrial shipping container—a conveyance of choice in human trafficking on the European black market—in the CAM courtyard, and the doors will be sealed shut at the start of the show. Anything can happen beyond that point, a circumstance that remains the horrifying norm for immigrants across the globe.