Asylum Monologues

This Sunday at St Mary’s you are invited to come to the Sunday Forum at 12noon in the Old Library to see a performance of the Asylum Monologues. This 40 minute play offers a first-hand account of the UK’s asylum system in the words of people who have experienced it. The monologues are often provocative and revealing - sometimes just raw and painful - in their gritty and unvarnished description of the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees.

The actors who will be performing the monologues belong to an organisation called Ice & Fire. The company explores human rights stories through performance. They put human rights at the core of everything they do to make accessible theatre for a wide range of audiences across the UK. They describe themselves as 'a company with a distinct and determined voice, developing original theatre pieces from human rights testimony and documentary evidence. Each piece is shaped by the real people and communities with whom we closely work. From full-scale productions to making small pieces with vulnerable groups, our theatre-making is renowned as provocative, principled and innovative’.

The monologues will be followed by a Q and A session with the actors. The event will finish at 1.00pm. I do hope that you will join us. At the 10.30am Sung Eucharist, we will be welcoming John Fenning, who has been involved in the resettlement of Syrian Refugees in Oxford. St Mary’s has been supporting a number of families in the course of the last year and it will be good for us to reflect on the ways in which our ministry of hospitality can continue to embrace and support the most vulnerable.

God, our hope and our desire,
we wait for your coming
as a woman longs for the birth,
the exile for her home,
the lover for the touch of his beloved,
and the humble poor for justice.

Revd Dr William Lamb

Vicar