I confess to a mild prejudice against a play whose only two characters are called AA and XX. Such stuff tends to make me go ZZ. But after a longish, slowish start Mrożek's Emigrés turns out to be neither abstract nor boring…. [AA is a] political refugee, and XX … is the sort of migrant wage-slave who may be found in many of the richer European nations, building tower blocks or digging sewers. Their somewhat unlikely cohabitation begins with bickering about food and rent, becomes a New Year's booze-up, and ends with the discussion about freedom and captivity that, given Mrożek's own status as an emigré from Poland, we should have expected all along. Both men, it emerges, feel more trapped in the liberal West than by any tyranny of secret police and one-party bureaucrats: the writer can't write, the labourer misses his family. A second...