Don't hate the media, become the media. Jello Biafra
Paz Koloman Kaiba & Isik Kaya
Asylum King
COLLECTIVE FRINGE | 2026
ASYLUM KING
Written by Paz Koloman Kaiba
Directed by Işik Kaya
Image © Collective Fringe
JAN, 22, 2026
A darkly comic political thriller following an ambitious journalist as she investigates the suspicious death of an asylum seeker inside a privately run detention facility. What begins as a career-making exposé quickly spirals into a disturbing encounter with institutional power, media complacency and moral compromise. As the lines between truth, ambition and complicity blur, the play dissects how stories are manipulated, whose voices are silenced, and what it costs to challenge the system.
Hi Paz & Işik, it’s really great to talk with you ahead of this years Collective Fringe, how does it feel to be at the festival with Asylum King?
Işik: Hi! We are very excited to be a part of Collective Fringe this year, along side some other fantastic shows. Asylum King has been a project that we have been developing for awhile now and it feels more current then ever, as it speaks directly to the issues of asylum law in the UK, how its perceived, how it’s used politically, and what it looks like in reality. An collective fringe understands how important these conversations are right now, which its why it’s a great and exciting chance to be part of the festival
Any nerves ahead of the run?
Işik: I don’t think there is a time where there isn’t excitement and a thousand things going through an artist’s mind right before the performance! The to-do lists, last minute check-ins and making sure everyone on the team feels comfortable and ready is quite a thing to go through. But this time around I think it’s a bit different with all the support that we have had from the festival as well as how hard our team worked to create Asylum King, I feel quite ready. There is a different kind of excitement though, presenting a new writing piece, written by Paz and devised by our wonderful cast and creative team is such an amazing feeling. I trust so much to our hard work, and hopefully the audience will feel the same way.
Paz: Not really, I’ve done my job. No, I am joking of course. It’s nerve wrecking any time you present something to an audience, especially something that talks about things that effect so many people. There is a responsibility that comes with that, and I think I’d be too detached or arrogant if I wasn’t feeling nervous about it.
What do you hope to take away from your time at Collective Fringe Festival 2026?
Işik: We wanted to be a part of Collective Fringe Festival this year because of the incredible community that they have created. I think it is a great place to meet like-minded creatives, see how other artists work and to connect with them. I hope that we keep the connections we made here going forward.
Paz: Yes, it’s a fantastic creative space that really tries to connect and introduce young working-class people to the performing arts and arts education, and we’ll be sure to jump on the chance to work with those brilliant young actors in the future.
What has the process been like working together on this play?
Işik: We previously worked together for a play ‘Hughesovka’ at National Theatre Wales where we worked with Ukrainian refugees and our debut play ‘The Mute Messiah’ which premiered at Camden Fringe Festival in 2024, so at this point I think we have built up a really good understanding of each other and our artistic instincts. Paz and I have very similar interest in themes that we like to bring in our craft but we come from very different backgrounds and disciplines. I think there is a nourishing thing there, where we constantly learn from each other and help develop our ideas further with bringing our different approaches on a topic, a scene, a mis-en-scene or working on dramaturgy. As we usually do devised work together, it is very important that we trust each other and hold space for both of us. I’m very glad that we have created Asylum King together and can’t wait to develop it further!
Paz: Agreed.
Can you tell me a little bit about Asylum King, what inspired your new play?
Paz: Asylum King really grew out of a long accumulation of things rather than one single moment. It came from working closely with refugees and people caught up in the asylum system, and from listening to stories that are so often flattened, sanitised, or simply ignored. I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated, but also increasingly curious, about how cruelty can become normalised through bureaucracy, how violence can be administered politely, with forms and procedures and policies. The play isn’t really interested in representation as sympathy alone; it’s interested in exposing structures. So we borrow heavily from documentary theatre and then use the format of a noir detective story to discover these elements throughout the play, whilst adding in some humour, because that’s what the system feels like: surreal, absurd, and terrifyingly real all at once. It’s a kind of political fable, I suppose, about who gets seen, who stays invisible, and who actually profits from suffering. At its heart, though, it’s about people, about resilience, about survival, about choices that can lead to change, and about what it means to keep your humanity intact inside a system that’s designed to strip it away. That’s what really inspired it.
"It is important to remember that theatre happens in the moment with presence of an audience and then becomes a memory whereas film is a physical asset that you can go back to whenever you want to."
- Isik Kaya
What was it about this plays themes that connect with you so much as a director?
Işik: I think it comes from being Turkish, and being a migrant, and carrying that double consciousness with me all the time. I care deeply about my diaspora and about the very ordinary, very daily experiences we have in the UK: the polite discrimination, the constant pressure to be quiet, not to take up space, not to draw attention, not to ask for too much. None of it is dramatic in isolation, but it accumulates, and it shapes how you move through the world. At the same time, I’m very conscious of my own privilege. I live in the UK with a visa that allows me to do the work I love, to live in a way that feels meaningful and self-directed, and that’s an enormous gift. I don’t take that lightly. But I also feel a responsibility not to let that comfort silence me about the harsher, uglier realities that so many migrants, asylum seekers and refugees face. Whether that’s in small, everyday interactions or in the way the system itself is designed and enforced. As an artist, especially in the current climate of tightening migration laws and hardening public attitudes, I feel I owe it to myself, to my community, and frankly to a wider sense of society, to keep speaking about these things. That’s why ‘Asylum King’ has such a special place in my heart.
How important is it for you as playwright to use humour to unpack such salient message that you have within Asylum King?
Paz: I think humour is absolutely vital. It’s a way of telling the truth without turning away from it. When you’re dealing with something as heavy, and as brutal as the asylum system, there’s a real risk that people just shut down if it’s presented in a purely solemn or didactic way. Humour creates a way in. It creates a shared space where you can suddenly slip in something very uncomfortable. For me, it’s not about trivialising suffering at all. Quite the opposite. It’s about humanising it, and about exposing the absurdities and hypocrisies of power. In Asylum King, the humour lets us see the machinery of cruelty more clearly, because it reveals just how normalised, banal, absurd, and ridiculous some of it is.
What was your time at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and how much does living in Wales influence your work?
Paz: Wales is still my home. It’s where I do most of my creative work, and it’s definitely the place that inspires me the most. My time at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama was really formative in terms of how I conduct myself as a theatre-maker, and it instilled a strong sense of professionalism rooted in craft, collaboration, and discipline, but also a sense that theatre has to be porous and human to the world around it; it’s something that grows out of community, out of shared struggle, out of listening. Living in Wales means being in a place of storytelling, of solidarity, of humour in hard times, and those qualities are absolutely woven into my work, whether I’m conscious of it or not. I’m currently writing a novel as part of Literature Wales’ Authors Development Programme, inspired by my time working in Merthyr Tydfil, and that kind of everyday poetry, that grit and tenderness, really sits at the heart of what I do.
How different is your approach to your theatre work compared to you filmmaking projects?
Işik: I am an interdisciplinary and collaborative artist, where in every project I do I am inspired and affected by other people and art forms. I did start my creative journey in theatre when I was a teenager, and moved into film gradually and finally finding my way back to theatre again. I find it difficult to stay exclusively with only on one of them as they really do feed and inform each other in such a way that is so nourishing. Film and theatre are sisters, but my god they are so different to work with!
The methods to use while directing actors on screen and stage are different: the understanding of light, sound, and everything technical, even scriptwriting. A beat that would feel so natural in a film definitely does not work on stage!
It is important to remember that theatre happens in the moment with presence of an audience and then becomes a memory whereas film is a physical asset that you can go back to whenever you want to. So, when filming a scene, I believe I have more of a fixed approach both technically and creatively, but in theatre, I trust the instincts of the actors and the audience in the moment for each performance as they are in a communication. I trust that relationship on stage more than anything, it is the most important aspect of theatre making for me.
Whether creating theatre or film, collaboration and trusting your team, keeping in mind that everyone in the project is interested in creating something extraordinary and are here to bring their creative abilities and technical knowledge is the key. Creating a space of safety, integrity, kindness is the most rewarding in either medium of my work and as an artist personally.
I do like to borrow and merge both disciplines as much as I can as well. Using film and video on stage and using theatre techniques in creating a film are great tools to enhance the story telling. I like to tell stories of real people, that we can connect to, the kind of people when we see them makes us think of a neighbour we once had or a distant cousin or ourselves, with stories that we’ve heard of, we’ve experienced. I believe in this naturalism even for both mediums.
Since forging your own creative path in the industry what have you learnt about yourself and the work you want to share with the world?
Paz: I think what I’ve learned, really, is that the process can come close to being as important as the product. Maybe a sixty–forty split. The more I’ve engaged seriously with how work is made, the more I’ve found myself returning to what Brecht was trying to do with the Lehrstücke, this idea that theatre isn’t just about presenting something finished, but about learning through doing, through inhabiting roles, postures, attitudes, and collapsing that neat division between actor and audience.
But at the same time, I don’t believe in process for its own sake. The way a piece is made shapes what it can say, absolutely, but without form, without ambition, without a substantial product, that process just becomes a kind of myopic exercise. It really matters what ends up on stage, what an audience is actually confronted with, because that’s where the politics of it live. Art is political. Once it’s shared with other people, it becomes a platform, a discussion space, a field where you work through questions of consent, ideology, resistance. So what I want to make is work rooted in real lives, real contradictions, real communities, collaboratively crafted with a lot of care for what it means, and what it can mean to the people telling their stories and the audience experiencing it. I guess more than anything, I’ve learned that belief is a choice. Belief in the necessity of art. Belief in people. Belief in change. You have to keep choosing that over safety, over trends, over a privileged and sometimes rather smug industry that spends a lot of time obsessing over itself, and, most of all, over despair.
And finally, what message do you hope audiences that come to see Asylum King will take from it?
Işik: That as humans we are all deserving of life, of safety and security and of understanding. Sometimes it’s worth reiterating these basics. I would love the audience to feel something similar to this. Also, to the corrupted organisations that we do see you, and we will not stop talking about injustice.
Paz: That the choices we make do have effects, sometimes more profoundly than we think. And that we can choose change.