Cleon:
My Dionyza, shall we rest us here
And by relating tales of others' griefs
See if 'twill teach us to forget our own.

Adrian Jackson, Artistic Director of Cardboard Citizens, looks back at the company's partnership production of Shakespeare's 'Pericles', developed with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In 1999, Cardboard Citizens was employed to record voices for some verbatim interviews a charity had conducted with rough sleepers. Amongst them was a remarkable narrative of a man who had lived in a tent in the woods for 14 years; eventually it became clear that the reason for his taking to the road in the first place was that he was running away from a terrible personal tragedy - his daughter had been killed in some kind of accident. Traumatised on reception of the news, he dug himself a grave in his garden and drank a couple of bottles of whisky, intending to take his own life. Only the intervention of a neighbour who spotted him, changed the man's mind. So instead:
'I walked. And I walked. And I walked. And I walked' And it was clear that he had been walking ever since.

I was very struck by the eloquence of this tale, its combination of unutterable pain, unspectacular but life-saving human intervention, and pure blind flight. And I found myself imagining this woodsman, whom I had never met, as the classic wild-haired tramp, the object of popular derision and disgust. Whenever one sees such a man or woman in the street, shouting at the traffic or slumped in lonely alcoholic misery, presumably there is just such a personal tragedy behind them - a story which might well involve nobility and sacrifice, as well as the inevitable ingredients of loss and separation.

So when, in a meeting first brokered by the Social Inclusion unit at the Arts Council, Clare Venables, then Education Director at the RSC, and I first started talking about Shakespeare, I re-read Pericles and this story came back to me. The traumatised, un-barbered, grieving Pericles of the second half would surely look just like one of these tramping lost souls. We found a way to include this story.

Other elements of the Pericles story seemed so contemporary. It was easy to imagine Pericles or Marina putting their case for asylum to immigration officers; and, in these fraught and jumpy times, when politicians quake at the thought of being labelled 'soft on asylum seekers', it was also quite possible to think of either or both being turned down, on the basis of improbabilities in their stories:

Pericles: Tell your history.
Marina: Did I tell my history,
it would seem like lies
Disdained in the reporting.

The onus appears to rest squarely on the applicant to prove his or her case for asylum - guilty unless proven innocent. One thinks of Pericles washed ashore near Pentapolis, and trying to prove his identity to the fishermen and thus his title to the armour which conveniently lands on the beach. As for Marina's story, it verges on the ridiculous - till you put it alongside the story of women trafficked from Eastern European or African countries, kidnapped by criminals and sold in serial transactions across Europe.

Cardboard Citizens has been working with refugees and asylum-seekers for some time now, as a natural extension of the company's work - long enough to have heard a variety of the common horror stories relating to the treatment of asylum-seekers on arrival here, both by the state and society at large. The casual cruelty of the massively inefficient state bureaucracies involved is well-documented; the thoughtless dispersal of individuals of different nationalities to far-flung corners of the country, where not a soul speaks their language or understands their problems; the adversarial tone of the whole process of their application for residential status, needlessly demeaning and disbelieving as a matter of policy, to 'catch people out'; the seeding and perpetuation of racism towards these outcasts, by the frequent and indeterminate use of words like 'bogus'. Stephen Frears' timely Dirty Pretty Things lays bare the extraordinary hypocrisy of our society, which happily turns a blind eye to the omnipresent and much-needed labour of the illegals washing our cars, and picking our fruit, and cleaning our hotel rooms. The point being that, though we may not be the criminals behind the suffocation of Chinese migrants or the sinking of boatloads of Iraqi refugees, we are all implicated, whether we like it or not.

All of this led us to Pericles, to look at it not only as the picaresque fairy tale which it undoubtedly is, but as a tale of exile and loss which has uncanny echoes in these times.

In Spring, Cardboard Citizens mounted a small-scale, story-telling production of the play, boiled down to one hour, with five actors and two stools, which we played to refugee groups around the capital - Afghans one night, Iraqis another, Kurds, Latin Americans, Africans, Albanians, Bosnians, as well as general audiences of homeless people (another kind of exile) and asylum-seekers.

The theatre became a meeting ground, a site of conversation; we told the story of Pericles, and they told us stories back, by turns amazing, shocking, unbelievable, painful, normal.

Lysimachus: I did not think thou couldst have spoke so well, ne'er dreamt as much.

The famous recognition scene drew tears from audiences who could barely understand the words, but knew something about separation and sometimes reunion; story has that power, which is why we need to hear the stories we are not given access to.

These stories became part of a larger site-specific co-production which we mounted in late Summer 2003, on a site last used to warehouse 500 rough sleepers at Christmas. The audience were processed on entry, and subjected to five minutes' silent study of the 19-page asylum application form, before the show segued gradually into Shakespeare's play. Throughout the piece, these stories came and went, interwoven into the fabric of the script - which otherwise was unadulterated Shakespeare; of course, the beauty of Pericles is that much of it is not by the man himself, so the civic duty of preservation does not in any case apply to the same extent as usual.

We played in 8 vast warehouse spaces, with the audience processing between them. One storm took place in a room full of drying clothes and washing machines; another on board ship was staged on top of a standard metal container of the kind made familiar in the Chinese immigrant tragedy, symbol of our globalised world. The goddess Diana was our own tragic goddess, Di, with the scene at her shrine played in front of a vast picture decked with floral tributes. And so on.

The company of 12 was drawn equally from our actors and actors who had worked with the RSC; there was a wedding dance created by Liam Steel with various refugee and cardboard citizens groups. The company benefited from wonderful voice tuition from Lyn Darnley, and choreography from Liz Rankin, both RSC stalwarts; on the production front too, there was very equal input. Michael Boyd prefaced our first reading with a stirring and honest speech about the importance of the project to his new RSC, and in spite of all difficulties, this spirit of mutual respect endured throughout.

The production was massive, and though the acoustic destroyed much continuity, the reviews were good and mixed, and the piece made its mark on audiences and many people loved it.

The only blight on the venture was that my intended co-director, Clare Venables, was too ill to take part at all, even to see the final production. As I am sure readers are aware, that great woman of the theatre died late last year - without her vision and belief, Pericles would not have happened. I missed her in rehearsals and I miss her now. Retrospectively, inadequately, I dedicate the show to her, a great human being, a distinguished director and a huge influence on so many lives.