War With The Newts casts its Fringe audience as refugees

Rescued from collapsing rafts by non governmental organisation SOS Mediterranee and charity Doctors Without Borders, those on board, including 123 children and seven pregnant women, were exhausted and traumatised. Many were badly injured by fuel burns, their open wounds exposed to the sea and tumultuous weather.

But Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini, of right-wing populist party Northern League, held fast: entry was forbidden.

Eventually Spain’s newly-elected prime minister Pedro Sanchez offered the ship safe harbour, but when the Aquarius docked in Valencia, some locals protested.

Refusing help to desperate people is at odds with most people’s basic sense of morality. And yet it’s doubtful Salvini and his voters, those Spaniards who bayed at the downtrodden or the supporters of comparably hard-line parties across Europe see themselves as the “bad guys”.

As shown daily by Donald Trump and now commonplace oddities such as the plastic bag ban by al Shabaab, a Somali-based terrorist group who see no contradiction between caring for the environment and mass murder, humans have an aptitude for doublethink that allows justification for almost anything.

Such issues are at the heart of War With The Newts, a show set to be a major talking point at the Fringe next month.

It’s presented by Knaive Theatre, the bold, fearless company behind previous Fringe smash Bin Laden: The One Man Show. In War With The Newts, the audience will be cast as refugees holed up in the hull of ship bobbing perilously in the waters off the Western Isles.

With a set by installation designer Hannah Sibai and a score by award-winning sonic artist Robert Bentall, the elaborate production will have a permanent home during the Fringe in the Machine Room, a room deep in the bowels of Summerhall.

“It would be impossible to have to take the set down and rebuild it every day,” says Knaive Theatre co-director Tyrrell Jones. “There’s just so much stuff to it. We’re trying to create the feeling as much as possible of being in the hull of an oyster ship for real.”

The audience, Jones explains, are refugees from “the first flood”, an environmental disaster in the not-too-distant, post-Brexit future.

“They are rescued by this organisation which is remotely operating the ship,” he says. “This organisation want them to know they aren’t responsible for the destruction, and they subject them to a ‘re-education campaign’.”

That part of the production will also tell the story of Karel Capek, the Czech author behind the original novel of the same name. Written during the summer of 1935, it centres on a newly-discovered species of intelligent newts and their subsequent enslavement by humans.

A satire on nationalism, insecure work and displacement anxiety – a Freudian term for taking out our frustrations on blameless others - it’s immersed in Capek’s anxieties around the rise of Nazism in neighbouring Germany and Austria.

In the book, first published in 1936, Capek expands on some of the ideas found in Rossum’s Universal Robots, a 1921 play credited with introducing the word “robot”.

“The word is derived from a Czech word which means ‘forced servitude’,” notes Jones, who adapted the book for this production, which features dramaturgy by former Radio 1 DJ Matthew Xia aka DJ Excalibah.

Capek’s robots weren’t whirring, metal machines, Jones says, but fleshy beings similar to those in Westworld. They were a simplified version of humans who didn’t require rest and were developed as a solution to the market’s rapacious demand for ever cheaper labour.

“War With The Newts took some of the ideas of Rossum’s Universal Robots and translated that into the time immediately before the Second World War,” says Jones.

“Capek observed that this period of capitalism wasn’t just about trying to find cheaper and cheaper labour, it was also about notions of otherness, of ‘othering’ people as somehow different from you.

“From the status of the newts, Capek systematises the rest of society. He tries to imagine what the whole world would do in reaction to their discovery. The result, he thought, would be this populist, right-wing backlash in which human beings are undermined, humiliated and displaced.”

When we characterise others as different to us in an apparently significant way, it’s easier to then characterise them as, say, being more suited to manual labour, or being inherently untrustworthy.

Amid a climate of xenophobia and militarism, “othering” takes on toxic power. As history shows time and again, soon you fear every knock at the door.

Two years after the publication of War With The Newts, Nazi agents came to arrest Capek, unaware the writer had succumbed to pneumonia months before at the age of 48. In September 1939 they came for his brother Josef, who eventually died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

Sharply prescient 80 years on, the book’s middle section contains a series of fake news clippings; attempts to put positive spin on the poor treatment of the newts.

“There’s a character, a kind of marketeer for this form of labour,” explains Jones. “She says the newts are not sentient and that slavery is actually good for them as it helps save their species as they are paying for themselves.

“It’s the same logic used for the domestication of any other animal, really, like people who say the fishing industry helps keep populations of fish stable. And, at different times in history, similar arguments have been used to justify the ways humans have been treated.”

The Summerhall audience will be, Jones says, “manipulated as much as possible” to go along with the justifications. The trick will be noticing when you do.

Knaive used a similar tactic in their 2017 show, Bin Laden: One Man Show, a work which has been performed around 130 times across the world from LA to Denmark.

There, the Al-Qaeda founder’s life story and speeches were told by Sam Redway, the company’s other co-director.

White, blond and English, Redway - who also stars in War With The Newts - used the heroic metaphors and heart-stirring music of classic American Western films. Bin Laden became relatable to audiences: in after-show discussions, people said how they had began to judge his ideas differently - that some had even been convinced by them.

“Some people were almost punching their fists in the air in support of him,” says Jones. “And then there’s a really uncomfortable moment when we get to 9/11.”

If people look like us, use language familiar to us, if we can relate to their lives, struggles and beliefs, it is easier to be convinced by what they say.

“We frame this in a similar way to that show, in terms of defending your country,” says Jones. “There’s a similar experience of alienation here too. We make the audience swallow the poison, and there’ll be a point hopefully when they realised what they’ve swallowed.”

That a book written on the eve of a mass humanitarian disaster has resonance in 2018 is uncomfortable but sadly undeniable.

“It concerns me enormously the times we are returning to in Europe,” says Jones, noting how, on his travels around Britain, he has seen an increase in troubling behaviour by “certain people emboldened since Brexit”.

“Comparing times of history is always problematic but at the same time, I think it would be very ignorant of me to say that none of those things are present now.”

He adds: “It does definitely feel like there is an element of history repeating itself. It’s there in terms of things like humiliating indigenous peoples and in these displaced feelings of anger and anxiety being directed at people who are ‘othered’ rather than at those with the power to change things.”

August 3 to August 26, The Machine Shop, Summerhall, Edinburgh, 5pm and 8pm, £12, £10 concs. Tel: 0131 560 1581. Tickets: bit.ly/NewtsSummerhall www.summerhall.co.uk www.knaivetheatre.com