Pinchbeck, M., 2024.

Border crossings: representing migrant labour in Berger and Mohr's A Seventh Man and its performance adaptations

A Seventh Man (1975) offers a probing articulation and interrogation of migrant labour. Co-authored by writer and artist John Berger with his longtime collaborator, photographer Jean Mohr, the book adopts a border-crossing form that structurally echoes the precarious journeys of its human subjects. A Seventh Man mixes reportage with Marxist analysis, reflection and poetry with data and diagrams; in addition, more than 200 photographs contribute a visual testimony that sometimes harmonises with the text and elsewhere disputes it. Berger and Mohr previously explored this mode of parallel documentation in A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967): in both works, the combination of unlike modes of expression opens multiple perspectives on the material, simultaneously exposing the partiality of any. Berger's fascination with the potencies of art forms, their capacities for communication and the opportunities and challenges posed for the reader/viewer, led him irresistibly towards theatre. Alongside new plays like A Question of Geography (1987), co-authored with Nella Bielski, and collaborations with directors including Simon McBurney (The Vertical Line, 1999), he was intrigued by and sometimes involved in adaptations of his work. While Complicite's The Three Lives of Lucie Cabrol (1994) is a well-known example, the Berger archive charts numerous adaptations which pursue a startling variety of forms. Here, we discuss three adaptations of A Seventh Man: by Foco Novo (1976), adapted by Adrian Mitchell and Roland Rees, designed by Ralph Steadman; by Théâtre Spirale (excerpts in Sortir de l'Ombre, 2000), directed by Patrick Mohr with Michelle Millner; finally, by Michael Pinchbeck and Ollie Smith (2020), the second in a performance trilogy by Pinchbeck based on Berger-Mohr collaborations. Our analysis unpicks the contrasting dramaturgical strategies employed by these adaptations in their efforts to stage the precarity of migrant worker experience as creatively, critically and ethically as in the original.