State of the nation

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 4th March 2009

England People Very Nice
Olivier

Toyer
Arts

It’s been a busy year for offence-junkies. Richard Bean’s new play has prompted anti-racism protests at the National. What for? The play is certainly racist in the narrow sense that it mocks the distinctions between races (or regions, for the most part, since Bean belongs to the same Aryan race as the Irish, French, eastern Europeans and Indians he mocks in this play). And he uses a strange device to pre-empt the outrage-vendors. We open in a detention centre where a group of asylum-seekers are, rather improbably, rehearsing a pageant that tells the history of migration to Britain. Cut to the play. The scene is Spitalfields, east London. From the 17th century onward we watch successive waves of immigrants as they face up to the prejudice, hostility and violence of the native population. The Huguenots, the Irish, the eastern European Jews, the Bangladeshis of the 20th century and finally, in recent years, the white yuppy refugees hounded out of Hampstead by their inability to raise a mortgage. Each incoming group struggles to modify itself to the culture of east London. There are jokes galore, some excellent, some a little frail. Try this. ‘Jews and Irish, that’s the worst type of intermarriage. You get a family of pissed-up burglars run by a clever accountant.’ Racist, yes, but more ribald than inflammatory.

This isn’t an outstanding play. It’s a good play, distinctly silly in places, and its historical scope deprives it of a storyline one can identify with until the second act. But it has a courageous mocking spirit and it brilliantly meets the NT’s brief, which is to foment debate without fear or scruple. Top marks for innovation as well. A tired old genre, the municipal pageant, has been transformed into a state-of-the-nation analysis. Nicholas Hytner, directing with his usual flair, manages yet again to make the Olivier work and creates the illusion that it’s a real theatre and not an aircraft hangar with some Odeon seating at one end. So is Bean a racist? Is Hytner? Maybe, just a smidge. Is that a big deal? Not at all. Unless you’re convinced all racists end up building gas chambers. And to make that assumption is to project a personal hang-up on to a social group you want to silence and eliminate because ignorance has made you fear them. The protestors clamouring for a ban are, in their fashion, xenophobic.

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