Feast for the senses

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.