What does an apple that has fallen to the road from the back of a lorry feel? Evidently the same thing as our hero, who finds himself on the cold streets of London without any money or friends, and no passport. All alone and redundant, empty as a plastic bag flapping in the wind.
Emigration, or immigration if we look at it the other way around, is a burning and painful theme. The immigrant is mostly associated with someone foreign. But what if we try to imagine that this foreigner is actually “one of our own”? Not so long ago, people left Estonia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe in about the same way as people are coming here nowadays. For instance, in the back of a lorry. Or by boat. Or on foot, slipping across borders.
Casting Out is based on stories that have actually happened. It is an odyssey of an angry young man who travelled to London in the 1990’s together with other fellow sufferers to seek his fortune. He emigrated.
According to the author, his play is an attempt to study what we call identity. Perhaps this is best manifested precisely by meeting something or someone else, by colliding with a different kind of identity? What place could be better for studying this phenomenon than London, a world metropolis where the question of immigration and identity touches everyone, from the Pakistani greengrocer to the superstar born in Zanzibar?