Never Fully Here. Seven Dials Playhouse.

Writer and performer Moana Doll’s 40-minute, single-hander, Never Fully Here, blends physical theatre, clowning, and third-person storytelling to explore the experience of moving to a new country. A recent MFA graduate of Drama Studio London, Cologne-born Doll’s unnamed, 20-something protagonist is a German who finds herself in the UK, so one assumes the piece is semi-autobiographical.

“She’s excited she’s alive”, we are told when the character first arrives in London, wheeling her suitcase around the auditorium and between rows of seats like a demented Teutonic version of Emily in Paris. The posters she puts up on her wall (adverts for French art films and Berlin’s left-wing Schaubühne theatre) hint at the character’s politics and artistic inclinations.

One year in, she is “walking faster, talking faster, and thinking faster” than she did back home and practising English tongue-twisters to rid herself of her German accent. Two years on, she is still working in Tesco and turning down social invitations because she cannot afford to buy drinks. Three years on, she is struggling to come up with the £6,000 it will cost to extend her visa and wondering whether there is a rational reason to stay in a country that, post-Brexit, apparently does not want her. The character’s solution to all these woes is to find strength and identity in the experience of living between cultures. Being partly but never fully here offers her comfort and possibility: boundaries become options.

The trials immigrants face in finding a sense of belonging in British society are common themes in British Black and Asian drama. But, as the character herself says, “some immigrants are not ‘immigrants’”. One cannot help feeling that what she proposes is a first-world solution to the problem of cultural assimilation, one that is available to an educated, middle-class white woman with an EU passport who speaks five languages. The strategy might be a great deal more complicated to implement for people whose skin is brown, whose education and English are poor, and whose ability to hop on a quick flight back home is limited.

It should also be noted that many of the challenges the character addresses will be familiar to anyone living in London, regardless of their background. Getting by on daily supermarket meal deals and having 389 rejected job applications are not exclusive to individuals caught between worlds. Indeed, the picture Doll paints of British life – a competition for minimum-wage jobs, impossibly expensive rent in hard-to-find accommodation, constant microaggressions, the ever-present birdsong of stolen Lime bikes – goes some way toward explaining why immigration itself is such a hot topic in modern British (and German) politics.  Still, the piece has something to say about the challenges of cultural adaptation and how political attitudes towards immigration can be experienced on a personal level.

Writer and Director:    Moana Doll