Abstract:

Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman (2001), which dramatises through the experiences of its asylum-seeking African protagonist the inhumane treatment of asylum-seekers and the violation of human rights at the detention centres in Britain, has so far been analysed within the frame of asylum theatre and feminism (by Elaine Aston in 2003), trauma drama and trauma theory (by Hildegard Klein in 2012) and from the perspective of cultural theory (by Sarah Gibson in 2013). In all these works, the analysis of the play has been conducted together with its so-called ‘companion piece’, Credible Witness (2001) by Timberlake Wertenbaker, which, too, dramatises the atrocities of political asylum in a transnational world and has been staged in the same year as Adshead’s play, in 2001. The aim of this paper, which will focus its attention solely on The Bogus Woman, will be to analyse the play from a transnational feminist perspective and to present how the issue of human rights is discussed within this feminist position.

Keywords: