The Great British Country Fête
Bush, until 14 August
The Great Game: Afghanistan, Part 1
Tricycle, until 29 August
Russell Kane, a rising star of stand-up, has penned a musical satire with an inflammatory theme. His play opens in a Suffolk village where the locals have risen up against Tesco’s attempts to blight the community with a thumping new shopping hub. Excellent subject! Rabid, thoughtless expansionism by supermarkets inspires rage in every corner of the country (apart from London, which couldn’t care less). After this superb set-up, the show goes wrong immediately and stumbles off in search of easy targets, facile rustic caricatures — the randy vicar, the gay farmer’s boy, the thick ferret-fancier, the racist lady from the WI, and so on. Here are some of Mr Kane’s gags. A farmer holds up a jar of home-made jam. ‘It’s got a hat. So it’s like a person.’ Later he imagines ‘getting a visa and going to Norfolk’. On this cold and heartless page these quips may look weaker than they sounded in real life but they give a measure of the show’s creative ambition. Mr Kane, who seems new to sketch writing, hasn’t mastered the art of joke geography and punchline placement. But it’s easy to learn. First write the sketch. Then write the sketch ten more times. Then find the best joke to emerge from that process. Then put it at the end of the sketch. That’s all there is to it.
The excellent cast, led by Katie Brayben, throw everything they’ve got at the show and the funniest moments come from the unscripted flourishes and gestures they’ve added. Towards the end, a high-quality routine appears. A gang of Bulgarian peasants sing an anthem celebrating the emptiness of Bulgarian folk culture. Witty stuff, Mr Kane, but what happened to Suffolk, Tesco, and the plot? Handled with verve and true satirical bite this show could tour the shires for many years, heartening the locals, packing the theatres and engorging the wallets of its happy authors. Instead it’s been badly fluffed. But the subject remains and so does the chance to tackle it with the punchy script it deserves. Try again, Mr Kane.
The Tricycle has revived its Olivier-nominated investigation of Afghanistan, which is due to tour America this autumn. I saw Part 1: 1842–1930 Invasions and Independence. This begins, peculiarly enough, in 1996. A faint air of muddle and disunity hovers over the whole evening. Fragments of monologue, some modern, some antique, are interspersed with one-act plays of uneven quality. One of these is close to being very good. Ron Hutchinson’s brief, funny drama set in 1893 shows the raffish Sir Henry Mortimer Durand persuading the twinkly Amir of Afghanistan to secure his borders by dividing Waziristan in two. The Amir responds by taking a map of Scotland and recommending a similar bisection of the lowlands. Hutchinson succeeds by using a light touch and crediting both parties with sophistication and intelligence.
The best quote of the night comes from an unnamed Nato commander who urges us to learn from our mistakes during the occupation. ‘Is this the start of the ninth year?’ he asks. ‘Or is it the start of the first year, for the ninth time?’ The worst morsel on display is a silly Brit-bashing sketch set in 1842. Four soldiers, in scarlet Trooping the Colour uniforms, interrogate an Afghan peasant at gunpoint. The soldiers are fabulously stupid and nasty while the Afghan, though in rags, is poised, articulate and highly educated. Screeds of gorgeously imaginative English flow from his lips and he enlivens his thoughts with flashes of philosophy and mirth. The soldiers murder him. Stephen Jeffreys, who wrote this noisy spasm of prejudice, does his subject no favours by pretending that Afghanistan is an innocent jewel violated by bestial foreigners. The truth is more complex.
The further you get from Afghanistan the more it seems like a proper country. Close up, it just looks like the point where all the surrounding countries ran out of puff. Geography has made it the chastity- belt of Asia — never prized for itself but valuable for what it can prevent others getting their hands on. The British held it to deny India to Russia. Nato holds it to deny training camps to al-Qa’eda. The difference is that the British policy was clear-eyed and practical, and it worked, just. Nato knows but won’t acknowledge that al-Qa’eda doesn’t need to train in Afghanistan when Pakistan, or a bedsit in Dudley, will do.
The Tricycle’s director, Nicholas Kent, deserves high praise for this inspired, if slightly flawed, project. I hope he repeats the experiment and turns to Iraq next time. Selection improves quality. He should consider commissioning 20 plays and staging only the very best. Then he might win not just a nomination but also the Olivier itself.
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