Abstract
This article analyses Get Back (2016), a play written by Diego Ameixeiras and directed by Jorge Coira. The text will be considered an example of an early Brexit narrative, and it will serve to explore how the new Galician diaspora is represented through the arts. Issues related to migration, racism, and precariousness bloom naturally from a play that gathers four Galician migrants in London, together with a British-born character, inside one of the carriages of the Tube. Old and new waves of Galician migrants will be juxtaposed through different characters, illustrating the complexity of this recent migratory phenomenon. Several stereotypes will be exposed to increase how Ameixeiras constructs generational and gender gaps existing among Pepe, Luisa, Rafa and Iria, four immigrants who find themselves sharing a carriage on the London Underground sometime during the aftermath of Brexit. Thanks to the multiple dichotomies and arguments that create an ambivalent sense of Galician identity abroad, the play runs very smoothly. The different points of view found in the text will reflect on the subaltern status of the characters, who seem to struggle to find their place in their host country.
Highlights
Of all the Tube trains that travel across the London Underground every day, what are the chances that four Galician migrants find themselves sharing the same carriage? This coincidence is the departing point of Get Back, a play written by Diego Ameixeiras (2016, unpublished) and directed by Jorge Coira
The play takes the name of one of the most famous songs released by The Beatles in 1969; it dealt with issues related to the United Kingdom’s immigration policies
As the following analysis will illustrate, the new Galician migrant that Ameixeiras represents in his text is highly critical of the social and political circumstances that took them abroad, a view that, allegedly, differs from the previous generation of migrants in the United Kingdom
Summary
Of all the Tube trains that travel across the London Underground every day, what are the chances that four Galician migrants find themselves sharing the same carriage? This coincidence is the departing point of Get Back, a play written by Diego Ameixeiras (2016, unpublished) and directed by Jorge Coira. As the following analysis will illustrate, the new Galician migrant that Ameixeiras represents in his text is highly critical of the social and political circumstances that took them abroad, a view that, allegedly, differs from the previous generation of migrants in the United Kingdom. There is a dichotomy between Pepe and Luisa, on the one hand, and Rafa and Iria, on the other.2 Pepe and Luisa belong to the first wave of Galician migration that arrived in the United Kingdom during the second half of the twentieth century and went through different vital experiences in the host country.
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