Dysney Disfunction – In Brexit Britain happily ever after (and UK residency) is just a marriage visa away. But Australian Alice’s visa expires today and she’s only got Primark flats for glass slippers, an Oyster card for a pumpkin coach and a prince who won’t twerk.
Alice always thought that love would be her fairytale. Yet now, en route to the airport, she waits forlornly at a London Underground station for her Prince Charming to realise his love and rescue her with a marriage proposal. Without a visa she faces a forced return to a country she doesn’t call home anymore.
As she debates the nature of love itself, whether love changes people and whether childhood stories have a place in the adult world, will Alice save herself or keep waiting for her Prince?
Are they just from the pages of Grimm and Disney films or do princesses and fairytales live on in the modern world? Do we create our modern versions via social media? As an apolitical Daily Mail reader who considers herself to be a feminist, is Alice that different to an American actress who can marry a real-life prince and gain the right to remain in the country?
Dysney Disfunction is written and performed with wit, verve and an overriding sense of fun and mischief by Fringe debutante Michelle Sewell. Its roots lie in real events, drawing on Michelle’s own experiences as an Australian immigrant in the UK whose visa expires this October. The show confronts notions of individual displacement and identity as the UK prepares to leave the European Union. It explores the distressing experiences of having to leave behind the people you love and the place you’ve made your home.
Directed by Cambridge Junction’s Regional Young Theatre Director, David Gilbert, developed with Soho Theatre, Cambridge Junction, The Barbican and Norwich Arts Centre with support from The UEA Enterprise Fund and StartEast.
Malcolm Bradbury Award winner Michelle Sewell was a Soho Young Company writer. She created HACK Theatre in 2016 and recently toured sell-out production, Border Control.
