Eye of a Needle

A bold new play that explores the UK’s immigration system and the absurdity of its approach to homosexual asylum seekers.

Eye of a Needle is an urgent, funny and moving drama that gets under the skin of the UK's immigration system and the cruel absurdity of its approach to homosexual asylum seekers.

Laurence is a caseworker at the department formerly known as the UK Border Agency. He prefers drug-fuelled nights out with the lads to the spirit-crushing accounts of the asylum seekers whose future he presides over during the day. But when Ugandan gay rights activist Natale Bamadi arrives, her tenacity and charisma awaken him to the cruelty of the system he serves. Laurence’s boss Ted, hounded by his superiors, detects the fragile beginnings of a passion and exploits it in order to expose his suspicion that Natale is in fact heterosexual. Caught up in the system’s machinations, Natale is forced to withdraw her application for asylum and is deported back to her death in Uganda. Unable to accept the inhumanity of the system Laurence walks out of his job leaving Ted alone struggling against the tide of an agency ‘not fit for purpose.’