- The Good Chance Theater Dome at Calais Jungle Refugee Camp
- The Jungle Theater Production
- Video of the Refugee Camp and Theater Beginnings
- Video of The Jungle Performance, refugees and cast
A Refugee Camp is Formed
Hope and crucial humanitarian bonds are created through the expression of the theater arts. A play inspired by real life events that took place in the Jungle refugee camp in France tours the world, bringing awareness and hope with it. The Good Chance theater began in the Jungle, an unofficial refugee and migrant encampment about an hour from Paris, in 2015. Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, two friends from University, created Good Chance theater in response to their experience as volunteers with the refugees at Calais.The French government allowed people to set up a shanty town and gave them basic services, which quickly turned into a sprawling tent city immersed in squalor. Men, women and children fleeing war and persecution took shelter by day in a 36 foot geodesic dome that was set up by “The Joes” and used as a type of Town Hall theater. This theater offered warm hospitality to all, a place to be human and to come to terms with who they were and why they might be there.

WHAT IS THE JUNGLE ABOUT?
Set in an Afghan Café at the heart of The Jungle, the story chronicles the lives that intersect there. A melting pot that thrusts audience members right into the action by placing them around the same long café tables that become walkways for the actors, the hub draws refugees from Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Eritrea and Syria amongst other war torn places. There’s Safi, a former literature student from Aleppo who views the camp with an optimistic light, Okot, a young Somali migrant whose harrowing journey casts his new home in a much darker light and Salar – owner of the café and camp leader, as well as well-meaning British volunteers that are caught up in the emotional fray. As tensions escalate with the authorities and within the camp itself, the startling tale of resilience poses thought provoking questions about the nature of asylum process, the concept of home and an international crisis that still very much exists, even if The Jungle is no longer operating. Good Chance theater continues to build temporary Theaters of Hope in the form of large geodesic domes, in areas where expression is stifled and where immigrant and local communities are struggling to integrate. In collaboration with local and international artists, they deliver a multi-genre program of workshops in their theaters and share this work with the wider public at a weekly Hope Show.



Theatre groups including the Royal Shakespeare Company put on performances and celebrities – e.g. Jude Law, put their name to the cause, raising awareness of the people and their plight, in balance to the vilification they were receiving by media.


“The Jungle was a reluctant home for thousands of people from all over the world. It was a place where people built temporary lives and communities formed out of necessity. People who visited asked why we built a theater in a refugee camp, but it’s always seemed clear to us that theater should be at the center of the conversation,” said Robertson and Murphy. “We’re thrilled to bring this play to West Coast audiences with its premiere at the historic Curran in San Francisco and look forward to sharing these timely and important stories.”
The heart of our mission at Pacific Domes has been to provide shelters for all, including relief domes for earthquake victims in Haiti and Honduras, hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and community space for the water protectors at Standing Rock in South Dakota to name a few.