Have Your Passport Ready review – step inside the asylum system

Brothers Khaled and Mohammad Aljawad offer a rare insight into life as a refugee in the UK with this powerful choose-your-own-adventure play

Every foreign humanitarian crisis forces a government to balance compassion and restraint. To what degree should a country fulfil its moral obligation to offer aid and sanctuary to refugees? At what point does national benevolence threaten national stability? Sober deliberation soon descends into hysterics. Respondents to a 1940 poll that asked British citizens to estimate the number of refugees from Nazi Germany who had come to Britain in the previous six years put the number at 2-4 million. The true figure was just 73,500.

Abuses - everything from verbal hatred to anti-immigration posters - are predicated on such fears and manipulative exaggerations. This is one of the clear lines drawn by Have Your Passport Ready, an interactive work of autobiography by Syrian-born brothers Khaled and Mohammad Aljawad.