Vernon Vanriel was a talented athlete who fought crack addiction, was sectioned twice and beaten up by police officers. Finally he ended up stateless in Jamaica. A new play tells his extraordinary life story
Vernon Vanriel thinks it’s ironic that a play about his life is now considered newsworthy. “For 13 years nobody wanted to know. Nobody wanted to listen to my story,” says the former boxer. Actually, Vanriel is playing it down. For many years, the British government refused to listen to his story. And what a story it is.
The play, On the Ropes, divides his life into 12 rounds. The 11th round was exposed by the Guardian in 2018. Vanriel was a victim of the government’s “hostile environment” policy and the Windrush scandal. Despite having lived in Britain since the age of six, he was prevented from returning because he didn’t have a British passport and had spent more than two years away in Jamaica, the country of his birth. The 12th round is the here and now – his life today back home, and the battles since his return.
