The play "Stolen" gives emotional resonance to political issues that audiences can relate to or become aware of. The author Jane Harrison and Wesley Enoch, whom is better known as the director of the first production of Stolen, have ensured that the play was from an Indigenous perspective as well as using universal themes in order to relate to the awful pain of a child being separated from their mother; being denied of one’s culture and language; and the suffering of being treated as an inferior race.
The play has an episodic structure with closely connected series of events such as "an accumulation of affecting experiences for the audience". These "experiences" are presented in a non-linear way so there is no particular chronology or direct
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Harrison has carefully structured the sequence of scenes to create "an accumulation" of ideas about being "Stolen". This is particularly effective in the repetition of scenes to emphasise the stories and show subtle changes in the characters. A good example is the repetition of the Line-Up scene. In "Line-Up age twelve", Shirley is particularly cynical, as she believes they will only be chosen to be unpaid servants for white families, while in the horrific scene in "Line-Up 3" depicts Jimmy’s ignorance to Shirley 's warnings of being chosen and Ruby 's traumatic behaviour from the effects of being chosen. The "Unspoken Abuse" scenes are very effective in showing the deterioration in Ruby 's mental health as she returns from her weekends, as for Jimmy, the irony of wanting so much to be chosen, ends in him suffering corresponding and similar physical and sexual abuse to Ruby. The repetition of the clapping song in the scenes emphasises the frequency of the abuse perpetrated on Ruby and Jimmy, and whilst Ruby 's scenes ended with the line "I promise not to tell", Jimmy does not speak, which foreshadows the traits of sexually assaulted victims; blame and ashamedness. These scenes exhibited the general idea of what it was like to be chosen during the assimilation