Mixed Up North
Wilton’s Music Hall
Letting in Air
Old Red Lion
Do you love theatre and hate musicals? Let me recommend the work of Robin Soans. In the past five years Soans has established himself as the most successful practitioner of verbatim theatre, plays drawn from the testimony of eyewitnesses. Where musicals aim for escapist frivolity and sometimes collapse into an extreme and debased form of falsehood, verbatim theatre remains rooted in truth and realism. In previous plays Soans has interviewed terrorists and quizzed distressed celebrities. This time he’s visited Burnley to discover the causes of the 2001 riots. The physical structure of post-industrial Burnley reinforces division. Each mill was surrounded by a tight network of streets where the workers were housed. The mills closed and the networks remained, emphasising territorial hatreds. But the energies released in 2001 were directed against authority rather than against rival tribes. ‘I never saw any Asian on white in the riots,’ says a young British Pakistani. ‘It was Asian on police and white on police.’ Ever since the riots (or ‘demonstrations’ as the council insists on calling them), Burnley has been helplessly appalled by its new-found reputation. It’s a Disneyland of dysfunction, a sociologists’ spa town, a tornado alley for storm-chasers and racial-tension-seekers. Swarms of do-gooders, mostly white, have arrived from all over the globe, brimming with virtue, beaming at Asians, accepting their samosas and secretly despising their culture. (This can’t be helped. Pleasure in scrutinising one’s inferiors has long been a secret boon of pastoral care.)
Marriages in Burnley are unconsciously classified along moral lines. Arranged marriages rank bottom. Mixed-race marriages rank top. In between are the marriages within the Asian community and those within the British community, with the Asians just ranking above the British. This system is loathed by Asians for understandable reasons. First, its co-ordinates are fixed by the Brits, who are reluctant even to acknowledge that it exists. Secondly, it enforces a caste system of the very type cited by the Brits as grounds for despising, and seeking to change, Asian culture. This is white supremacy with a LibDem smirk on its face.
But it’s not just the whites who get a pasting here. Shocking stories are told of Asian businessmen grooming underage girls with alcohol, posh frocks and class-A drugs. Once the victim is hooked she can be passed around like a box of Quality Street between her captors’ brothers and cousins. Soans has edited his material with extraordinary skill so it glides between tragedy and farce, between horror and humour, with an inner dramatic vibrancy that still retains the untidiness of real life.
Max Stafford-Clark’s direction is judiciously brilliant. At first, I have to admit, I wasn’t convinced. The opening ten minutes made me feel distracted and uneasy. The house lights are left on, the actors leap and gambol around every inch of the venue trying unnaturally hard to be natural. They sidle up to audience members, they offer cake, they offer kisses, they offer salad. I got my face stroked. But this disruptive approach has its own shrewd logic. The show is popular with drama teachers and their giggling captives. And an audience that features two dozen snickering teens transcribing profanities (‘Paki-shagger’, ‘fat Bungi bitch’) into their GCSE notebooks might interfere with the formalities. But the production’s ragged and untamed approach can enfold any number of wise-cracking kids within its broad embrace. Right now the show is finishing a national tour. A fresh lap of honour is inevitable. If the parade comes within 50 miles of your home, surge forth and feast your senses. This is a cultural treasure.
At the Old Red Lion, another slice of gritty northern realism. Becky Prestwich’s new play opens with the news that Adam’s mother has killed herself. Frank, his dad, fills the gap by striking up a rather improbable friendship with a demented waif called Amy, who spouts endearing gibberish the whole time. Adam’s girlfriend tries to knit these damaged misfits together while the true circumstances of the mother’s suicide emerge. Put like that it all sounds very complicated, silly and contrived. But this is a wonderful small play.
Once the elements are set in place the story takes on its own momentum and develops into a highly rewarding exploration of the emotional cost of censoring family secrets. Rebecca Elliot plays the verbally burbling Amy with truth and compassion, allowing the laughs to emerge of their own accord. The girlfriend, Olivia, is played by Tessa Mabbitt, a fabulous tangle-haired brunette who looks as if she’s just stepped out of a Pompeii mosaic. A talent well worth watching. A few decades ago we used to enjoy one-off plays like this every Wednesday on the BBC. Nowadays the search for original drama forces us to brave the knife-torn alleys of north London. Still, the BBC’s loss is the mugger’s gain.
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