Haunted Stages: The Trauma of New Slaveries in Contemporary British Theatre and Television Drama

The number of enslaved people living in contemporary Britain is extremely hard to estimate, but it is believed that, in the sex trade alone, 4,000 people are trafficked annually into the UK. The isolated and fragmented existence of undocumented migrants is rarely recorded; therefore, they have access to few rights and are often referred to as ‘invisibles’, ‘ghosts’, non-persons’, ‘unpersons’. In a number of previous essays, I focused on the ways in which their ghostliness is represented in literature and the arts. Moreover, the scattered places in which they are imprisoned belong to a wide range of typologies: factories, cultivated fields, truck containers, picturesque beaches – forming a concentrationary archipelago throughout the country. This article focuses mainly on the trauma produced by these forms of exploitation through a study of recent plays, TV dramas and unpublished scripts (by writing companies dealing with human rights issues), in order to show how they employ, construct and organise their characteristic spaces (the stage and the camera shot) to convey the relationship between the traumatic experience of new slaveries and its two key images – the ghost and the prison/concentration camp. The settings in question are either detention centres for asylum seekers or private homes where women are exploited as migrant domestic workers or sex slaves. Paradoxically, the neologism “fugeed”, is defined in Morgan’s play through the image of a derelict house: “lived in, soiled, stained, looted, or otherwise damaged by a lengthy dirty habitation”. There is, however, another, more sophisticated way in which the structure of the house is eroded, though. In some of the works analysed here (especially Morgan’s and Kirkwood’s plays), this process of crumbling is conveyed by making reference to the traumatic experiences of refugees and new slaves: they are seen as spectres haunted, in their turn, by the ghosts from their past. Consequently, the space of the house is invaded by people and outdoor spaces deriving from previous experiences. In other words, the stage and its house-setting are turned into an expressionist, non-naturalistic equivalent of the troubled psychological state of these migrants, in a continuous overlapping of temporal and spatial dimensions.