‘Passport’ Review: A Master of Comedy in a Migrant Camp

Badly injured from a fight, a man wakes up in the Calais Jungle, a ramshackle camp for migrants in northern France. His memory is gone, and all he has on him is an Eritrean passport with the name “Issa.”

That’s the premise of Alexis Michalik’s brisk, effective new play “Passport,” which was greeted with a standing ovation last weekend in Paris. Until it was demolished in 2016, the overcrowded Jungle encampment stood as a symbol of Europe’s refugee crisis, which hasn’t entirely subsided. While the site itself is gone, migrants still regularly attempt to cross the English Channel from the Calais area and reach Britain.

Many in the French theater world publicly supported the people living in the Jungle, and a handful of small-scale productions in France took the camp as inspiration. Still, the first major play about it came from Britain, in 2017: Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson’s immersive “The Jungle” was inspired by the directors’ time in Calais, where they set up a theater with migrants. It went on to become a trans-Atlantic hit, and was revived last year at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn.

In some ways, Michalik was an unlikely name to follow suit. A star of the commercial theater sector in France, he has built his reputation on accessible, fast-paced comedy dramas like “Edmond,” a “Shakespeare in Love”-style spin on the life of the French playwright Edmond Rostand. His last stage endeavor was a French-language adaptation of the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.”

Yet Michalik has tiptoed into heavier subject matters in recent years — first with “Intra Muros,” a play set in a maximum-security prison, then with “A Love Story,” which centered on a lesbian couple’s I.V.F. journey.

“Passport,” which is playing at the Théâtre de la Renaissance through June 30, wades even more openly into current political battles in France, where immigration restrictions have been at the forefront of President Emmanuel Macron’s agenda. In response, Michalik, who wrote and directed the play, invokes the audience’s empathy. “Imagine if a war started here, in your country,” one actor tells us near the beginning. “Your life is threatened, so logically, you decide to leave.”