Oberon Modern Plays

A man wakes, face down, sprawled across his single bed, the sunlight gently creeping through the window. Today is the day he will change his life. A Boeing 777 begins its descent towards Heathrow. The wheels unfold out of the belly of the plane. The frozen body of a stowaway is tipped out and cuts through the clear morning sky

In the car park of B&Q, Andy looks up. Something is falling out of the sky. A man crash-lands on the ground in front of him.

Stowaway is the story of a man from India who moves to the UAE for the promise of work and prosperity. When he finds himself trapped within a Dubai labour camp, with his passport and wages withheld from him, he hides in the wheel well of a plane bound for the UK, in a bid for a better life. It’s a story about invisible and physical borders and the people who transcend them.

But what are the rules of telling someone else’s story when they come from a world so very different from our own; where telling their story could act to perpetuate an unresolved history of imperialism?

With the skeleton of a plane cutting across the stage, Stowaway flies back and forth through time and place, looking at storytelling as a political act.