A Young Refugee’s Journey

DAVID LAN, WRITER AND PRODUCER, “THE WALK”: Well, she’s very big. She’s a very big little girl. But she is just a little girl who is on a long journey because she’s looking for her mother. We started from a very simple premise. A number of us had been involved in the creation of a play called “The Jungle” which was about the creation and the demise of a refugee camp in Calais, that was there for a number of years and to some degree is still there, occupied by people who are fleeing a whole range of disastrous circumstances in their home countries. People from Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and Iran and so on. And two young writers wrote a play about the experience they’d had of spending time. They had spent about seven months in the refugee camp. One of the characters in this play is a little girl, who in the play is called Little Amal. We produced the play — I produced the play when I was running a theater in London. And we took the play into the west end in London. We brought it to New York, we brought to San Francisco, and the show is still alive. And when it is possible to do theater again, we will do it again. But in the course of making the play, creating the show, we took too many people, young people, old people, children who had made the very long journey out of warfare, out of disaster looking for safety. And we felt having heard from them of their experience, that as artists, I mean, we’re artists, we’re theater people. We’re not politicians or diplomats. But we felt that something more than creating that play was necessary. And we came up with the idea of paying homage to this extraordinary experience that hundreds of thousands of people have had over the last year