Sophie Besse’s new play features a cast of former camp inhabitants who have found a new way to tell their story

Sophie Besse remembers the moment she first saw the funny side of the Calais migrant camp. She was volunteering in the camp when a fashion show was organised. Refugees and asylum seekers paraded down a makeshift catwalk wearing some of the more ridiculous items that had been donated.

“There was a wedding dress, swimming costumes, and I was like, oh my God. You want to laugh about that, the way you deal with horror is to just laugh,” said Besse.

A theatre director and therapist, she had been volunteering in Calais since August 2015, initially distributing donations and then running workshops. Back in the UK after the camp’s demolition, she decided to work with some of the asylum seekers and refugees she had met, and the play Borderline, a comedy about a tragedy, was born.

The play’s cast is made up of 13 people, seven are either refugees or asylum seekers, all of whom came through Calais. The remaining six are British, French and a Chilean, who take various roles including hapless volunteers, brutal French police, a police dog and a handwringing Home Office employee there to announce the camp’s demolition.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Enayetullah Jalazai, left, with fellow Borderline performer Mohamed Sarrar. Photograph: Psyche Delight Theatre Company

The fashion show Besse witnessed features prominently in the play, which is showing at Southbank Centre as part of Refugee Week. Various actors emerge clad in ridiculous gear – yellow women’s shorts, a shiny red jacket, a tiny handbag, before 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker Enayetullah Jalazai emerges from the wings for the climax of the scene, dressed in a ruffled women’s swimming costume and elbow-length white gloves.

Jalazai is a natural comic. “I love making people laugh,” he tells me before the show, after introducing himself as James Bond and interrupting Besse to say that the next stop for the touring show isn’t Sheffield, but “Los Angeles, Hollywood!”

Onstage during the fashion show scene, Jalazai plays the crowd for maximum laughs, removing his gloves as La Vie en Rose is played on the accordion and dropping them into the laps of audience members. But suddenly the scene takes a different turn and the news comes that a 14-year-old boy, has died trying to make the journey to the UK. The laughing audience is brought up short as the actors form a circle to mourn. There might be light moments in this tragic situation, we are reminded, but the Calais camp was still a tragedy.

“As you know tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin,” says another of the actors, 33-year-old Syrian refugee Baraa Halabieh. “In the darkest moments of your life you find humour, you find happiness, so even in the situation in Calais, it’s a tragedy, it’s inhuman, it’s really one of the worst situations among the refugee camps, but people used to find moments to enjoy themselves and to have fun and to prank each other.

“We are not making a comedy of refugees, we’re making a comedy of the situation itself. We’re making fun of how the French government deals with this situation, how the Home Office is dealing with this situation, we’re making fun of the volunteers who go there without having any experience of what they’re going to do and they go there like they’re going to Glastonbury festival. This is what we’re making fun of.”

In one of the standout scenes of the show a British volunteer, played byTracy Radzan, wears hippy trousers and a T-shirt that reads #BeenToCalais and holds a ukulele. She enters the stage calling out to the assembled group of asylum seekers: “Syrians! Syrians! Are you Syrian?” They aren’t and she moves on to find someone more worthy of her help, before Halabieh emerges, chest thrust out and triumphant music announcing his presence. “Oh my God,” mouths the volunteer. “A Syrian.”

For Besse, the play was about two things – skewering the absurdities and horror of the camp, and allowing the play to be a kind of therapy for the actors, both through telling their stories – the play was devised during a six-week process in which the asylum seekers worked out which parts of their stories they wanted to present and how they wanted to tell them – and through the camaraderie of the cast.

She talks about Mohand, a Sudanese refugee who is in the cast and was sent to Bradford upon arrival in the UK. He felt isolated and alone there and told her that despite its horrors, he missed Calais because of the community.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Borderline. Photograph: Psyche Delight Theatre Company

For many, and particularly for Jalazai, an unaccompanied teenager, the cast of the play has become a surrogate family, with the group celebrating birthdays and New Year’s Eve together as well as staying together at Besse’s house when they travel from different parts of the country to get together to rehearse.

“I have friends only from Borderline,” says Jalazai. “[With them] I feel like family, like brothers. I come to Borderline sometimes not to play Borderline but to see brothers, parents. This play, I like the people, I like making people laugh, all is like,” he says.

Besse translates: “I like everything, he means.” Jalazai nods.

Borderline is showing at Southbank Centre as part of Refugee Week on 21 June, then as part of the Migration Matters Festival in Sheffield on 24 June, before going on tour across Europe. Details of tour dates can be found here.

A behind-the-scenes Guardian documentary on Borderline launches July 12.