Video interview: asylum-seeker's trauma and humour brought to the Chichester stage

Dritan Kastrati is co-author with Nicola McCartney of How Not To Drown (Minerva Theatre, February 14-18), a piece in which he plays himself – and is also at times played by the four other members of the company. In 2002, in the turmoil after the end of the Kosovan War, Dritan is sent on the perilous journey across the Adriatic with a gang of people smugglers to a new life in Europe. But the fight for survival continues as he clings to his identity and sense of self when he ends up in the British care system.

As Nicola says: “I was working with Frantic Assembly and I was having dinner with their artistic director Scott Graham in Edinburgh in late 2014. I was telling him about a project that I’d been working on in the US about women leaving the criminal justice system and about the way that I work with marginalised voices, people who have perhaps been through traumatic experiences. I get them to tell me their story and then we work together to create a work of art. And Scott said to me that the way I was describing the work I do made him think of this young guy Dritan and his own refugee story. But the problem was that Dritan could only tell the funny bits. He was finding it just too difficult to tell the rest. So what happened was Frantic Assembly brought me to London to give a workshop that I use with people that have suffered or have suffered and survived, but in effect Dritan realised that it was a set up. He said ‘You're doing this for me, aren't you? Let's go for it!’ I said to him ‘Tell me your story in a sentence’ and he said ‘Kosovan War, refugee, care system.’ And so I started asking him about his story, but not asking anything too traumatic and the first thing I said was ‘Tell me about growing up in the mountains.’ The first story he told me was when he was learning to swim at the age of six. He was just thrown in. That's how you learn to swim or drown but in this particular situation he did actually almost drown but actually got to safety. But then he realised he was on the opposite side of the river to his friends and he ended up walking for miles until he found some stepping stones back across. He had to go the long, long way round… and the moment he was telling me this I realised that this was a metaphor for the whole of this story.

“We were together for four years and he just eventually told me everything in a very fragmented way. It was very emotional. It's very intense and we ended up with hundreds of hours of us talking and then we just decided to put it together. I focused on the type of theatre that he wanted to make. He wanted a piece of physical theatre but the structure had to be a structure that worked. It could be narrative or it could be reflective of the trauma that is still there. He is very tough and very macho but we drew up all the events in his life on a whiteboard and he saw it and just collapsed. He wept for some time. It was like he was looking at himself for the first time. He realised he was just a little kid when it happened…” Hence the structure they adopted: older Dritan looking back, younger Dritan going through it all…

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