Gone Too Far!
Hackney Empire
Eating Ice Cream on Gaza Beach
Soho
Piaf
Donmar
Anyone for a knife crime comedy? Bola Agbaje’s attempt to get laughs from our anxieties about blade-wielding teenagers might have been a disaster if the script hadn’t been so witty and its examination of the subdivisions within black culture so penetrating. The play starts out, rather improbably, with a Nigerian boy Ikudayesi arriving to spend time with his brother Yemi who has been brought up in Britain. Yemi has always posed as a fashionable Caribbean and suppressed his west African lineage from a misplaced sense of shame. As a mixed-race kid puts it, ‘The Africans sold us to the white man and stayed behind living like kings and queens in their palaces.’ Yemi is absurdly ignorant about Nigeria. Ikudayesi asks what time it is and Yemi says, ‘Can’t you tell by looking up at the sun?’ The themes of the play resonated so powerfully with the audience in Hackney, where I saw it, that the actors were thrown off balance. Great chunks of dialogue were inaudible because the audience was still howling with laughter and delight at the last bit. An argument between dark-skinned Paris and mixed-race Armani had the house gasping with shock and recognition. Armani accused Paris of envying her pale complexion. Paris blazed back angrily. ‘Trouble with you mixed-race girls. You’re confused! You don’t know whether to play the white side or the dark side.’ She derided Armani for knowing nothing of Jamaican cuisine because her white mother cooked only beans on toast. The play has room for pathos as well as satire. When Ikudayesi tries to help a white granny with her spilt shopping she mistakes his attention for an attempt to rob her and dashes away panicking. This sent a shiver of horror, pity and shame through the theatre.
Gone Too Far! is a rarity, a play that can persuade young audiences that the theatre offers pleasures unavailable elsewhere. After the show there was a knife crime debate where an impressive youth worker named John Bravo told the teenage boys in the audience, ‘Black kids blame the police when they get stopped and searched. Don’t blame the police. It’s your fault. Look at the statistics. See how many black kids carry knives.’ He was black himself, and 19 years old, so he knew what he was talking about. He urged his peers to question the platitude that ‘the community’ must show young people how to live. No, he said, young people must show the community that they know how to live. These uncomfortable truths were universally applauded.
The National Youth Theatre also wants to attract young audiences but it needs meatier fare than Shelley Silas’s whimsical new play set in Gaza where everyone gathers on the beach to gossip, eat ice-lollies and complain about the Israelis. The story follows Adrian, a ginger-haired English Jew, who is spending his gap year chatting to Palestinians. The dialogue is threadbare and repetitive. ‘I just want to understand,’ says Adrian three times. ‘Have you come to make peace?’ he’s asked four times. The characters are devoid of vitality or novelty. The males work off their aggression by playing football while the females are required to do little more than grimace as if they’ve been waiting for a bus for 3,000 years. There’s a chorus of veiled snifflers who burst into tears in harmony and add sound effects to complement the action. When a drowned child is mentioned by her bereaved mum, the womenfolk cradle their arms and make sploshing noises and then fling out their hands in a gesture of loss. The play climaxes with a peaceful protest being broken up by trigger-happy Israeli hotheads. Naturally, someone innocent gets shot and the only surprise is that it’s not Adrian. The play ends with no one, audience included, understanding anything.
Piaf is a wonderful production of Pam Gems’s flawed but highly entertaining play. The trouble is that the script almost kills itself with overwork. Starting with Piaf’s chance discovery in the street, it follows her through the depression, the war, the occupation, the peace, her triumph in France and America, friendships with Dietrich and Aznavour, strings of toyboys, several car crashes and her last-gasp marriage to a Greek hairdresser 20 years her junior. Elena Roger brilliantly evokes Piaf’s coarseness, energy and humour but she can’t reproduce that voice. The one thing that draws us to Piaf was missing. Not that this bothered the audience much. I’ve rarely seen a crowd leap so readily from their seats to applaud. A few tickets are still available.
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