Home and away | 9 July 2015

Refugee crisis in the Mediterranean! Fear not. Anders Lustgarten and his trusty rescue ship are here to save mankind. Lampedusa consists of two monologues, one Italian, one English, which tackle the problem at home and abroad. We meet Stephano, a cartoon fisherman with a Zorba beard and a chunky woollen sweater who lives on Italy’s southernmost salient about 70 miles off the African coast. He follows an improbable path from xenophobia to enlightened altruism. At first he mistrusts the runaways whose corpses choke his native shore. He asks survivors why they don’t ‘speak the language’. ‘We do,’ they reply, in English. ‘This is Europe’s language.’ He saves a drowning African from a shoal of cadavers and learns that the man’s fiancée is due to join him on Lampedusa. By some miracle she arrives safely and Stephano, by now guest of honour at their wedding, is overcome with spiritual gratitude. He acclaims them for giving his country ‘life and hope’. Some might suggest that Italy well understood ‘life and hope’ long before the newcomers began arriving in coffin-ships to add to the supply. But never mind. Stephano’s honeyed conclusion slips down nicely.

Back in England we meet Denise, whose spiky language and internal contradictions make her much more fun than the worthy Stephano. She’s a half-Chinese Tory-voter from Yorkshire who loathes tax-funded indolence. By day she works as a debt enforcer. By night she studies for a degree in politics. Her feckless ‘clients’ invariably blame their debts on her. The men insult her because, as she says, no man wants to be humiliated by a woman. And the females are worse. Simple reason: ‘Women fucking hate women.’ She says her clients live in houses knee-deep with pizza boxes and spend their days consuming burgers and trashy TV shows that flicker across huge plasma screens.