Andrew McWhirter talks to theatre workshop director Robert Rae on Scotland’s capital, refugees and his transition to film
IT SPEAKS volumes of playwright turned director Robert Rae’s relationship with his asylum-seeking collaborators, when he says that he that he has an understanding of what torture means without being subjected to it himself.
This year he makes the transition from championing equal rights for the socially disadvantaged on the boards to, well, much of the same on HD-Cam. Looking to claim a second prize from BAFTA Scotland (following on from his Best New Fiction Award) in the Best Performance category, Rae’s leading lady in refugee drama Trouble Sleeping, Alia Alzougbi, is in exalted company alongside Robert Carlyle and Brian Cox. The debutant director acknowledges not only what the part has done for the actress, but how she mentored the film’s community actors. “Ali was terrific in that respect, putting people at ease, but also with her own feat. She’s been getting a fair bit of work after that performance.” Perhaps the screening on BBC last month or its modest £386,750 budget has kept it from a Best Film nomination, as with its motifs of torture, asylum, disability and sexuality in a climate of fear, its relevance arguably resonates far more than the nominated nationalistic tourist-piece, Stone of Destiny.
Rae maintains he wasn’t aiming for pluralistic targets. “It only dawned on me later how many issues emerge. Somebody said they found the gay character with cerebral palsy excessive, but this happened to a gay disabled man that I knew who offered to marry someone in order to give them UK status. Oddly, that wasn’t a far-fetched story. It just happened to be a disabled man that made that offer.”
Clearly, this was a case for life being, not necessarily stranger but more poignant than fiction. Rae was greatly affected by the stories of his untested actors, but adds that he’d already prepared himself for the despairing community recounts that would comprise his script. “I did know a fair bit, working with my co-writer Ghazi Hussein before, and about torture – which is like child abuse or very similar, like rape really in that the victim must live with the consequences of it. I understood that.”
While the ensemble piece deals with many issues, it highlights the plight of two characters coming to terms with torture. One’s story isn’t deemed believable enough to validate his claim for asylum in Glasgow, so he seeks refuge in Edinburgh.
Filmed in Scotland’s capital, the opening scenes pay homage to those who protested against the dawn raids at the Kingsway flats in Glasgow and served to highlight a key difference between the two cities. Rae believes the differences in how asylum is handled and perceived between the east and west of Scotland are vast and stem from a structural level.
People who end up in Edinburgh drift there, and there’s that thing about Glasgow that says ‘settle’.” His long-term collaborator, Hussein, an exiled Palestinian poet who was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured when he was younger, stayed in the Glaswegian YMCA with his two children and informs Rae’s knowledge of the benefit-orientated system. “You get support for your housing, but ironically there is more work in Edinburgh of a casual nature – cafés and so on – it’s easier to come by. The refugees in Glasgow await their fate without work, they stay within the system and get their benefits sorted and sit it out. It therefore keeps them in one place, but once they move to Edinburgh they can’t do that and I think a lot of them like it. It means they are free.” Or as free as they can be under constant surveillance.
A committed socialist, Rae is keen to point out the camaraderie on set and within the refugee community in the face of such strict monitoring. “Because of the parliament now, and diplomatic visits, too, you have to be careful”, he says wryly. “Government task forces are assigned to spy and often people would joke about who had the most competent surveillance officer and who had the best personal watch, because they’d often have one each. It’s ludicrous.”
For someone consistently admired for his innovative plays, it’s not hard to imagine the reasons behind Rae’s sticking his neck on the line with the cut-throat business of movies. Working for many years with John McGrath at the 7:84 Theatre Company, it wasn’t until he’d written the genetics-themed D.A.R.E (Disabled Anarchists’ Revolutionary Enclave), aiming to change perceptions, that his work with film began – via compiling inter-textual al Qaida-style farewell videos. Thinking of another collaborator from his past, Jim Sheridan, Rae ponders whether it was at the time of seeing that director’s In the Name of the Father which made up his mind to give cinema a go. “There’s something of the popular that impressed me about it, by having hundreds of thousands of people watching your work. Albeit I didn’t get around to it for quite a few years later.” But the transition certainly wasn’t as smooth as he’d hoped. “There were just some practices where you think, well that might be the way the film industry does it, but why? Because that just alienates people. Daft things, like ensuring whose call it was to see who was allowed in the canteen. Well, you’ve got to say: ‘Come on a sec, think of these people, can’t we just feed them throughout the process?’”
The refugee actors are clearly more vulnerable because they display their lives in the raw. His film is both venerable and humorous in some cases – as Rae notes over its revelations of asylum-claiming tricks. “Fouad Cherif, who plays fly-guy Kamal, got some good-humoured stick walking down the street from some of the community for giving away secrets”, Rae recalls. “He had to deflect it by saying: ‘It wasn’t really me, don’t blame me, I’m an actor’.”
At other points, however, great perseverance was critical for all involved. “I remember talking to Nick Broomfield about this and his film Battle for Haditha, and the experience of using people who are non-actors”, says Rae considering how you have to manage expectations and levels of trust. “Because they trusted us, it wasn’t too far removed from how you deal with the issues in a documentary, protecting people from what may emerge. It’s not just a cheap way to make movies. You’re dealing with people who are giving up not just their time, but their soul, in a way.”
It’s these efforts and attention to details that, even when considered against similar works in Dirty Pretty Things or In This World, contribute to what has been realised as one of the best refugee films to date – and an impressive cinematic entrance from Rae.
Andrew McWhirter is a freelance journalist. The BAFTA Scotland Awards take place on the November 9 in Glasgow. For more information visit www.baftascotland.co.uk
