Public discourses around asylum seekers and refugees are dominant within UK media and politics. In recent years, theatre makers in the UK have sought to engage with these discourses and stage work which aims to tell authentic stories around the lived experience of being an asylum seeker or refugee and engaging in the UK Asylum system.

This panel discussion brings together the co-writers of How Not to Drown, an award-winning play which tours to Traverse Theatre from 29th March to 1 April: playwright and applied theatre maker, Nicola McCartney, and Dritan Kastrati, actor and former unaccompanied child asylum seeker, whose own story the play tells. Nicola McCartney and Dritan Kastrati will talk about the unique process by which they brought Dritan’s real-life story of his perilous journey to the UK as an unaccompanied young asylum seeker.

They will be joined by Professor Sharon Cowan, Professor of Feminist and Queer Legal Studies, who consulted on the play, and Laura Mallows, Executive Producer of ThickSkin Theatre Company. The panel will discuss the ethics and the process around staging asylum stories: notions of "authenticity", the underlying assumptions about what "truth" is and how we get at it, objectivity/objectivity etc, in the story telling techniques / goals in theatre as opposed to law.

Chair: Dr Helene Grøn, (University of Copenhagen) playwright and an interdisciplinary researcher, combining research on topics of human rights, relationships of love and belonging, narratives of trauma and resilience and artistic interventions into forced migration.