“They’re all the same, aren’t they?” is the laziest of racist remarks. It sounds bland and glib but it cuts to the quick when it’s applied to you. I am a white British male and have only been on the receiving end once: I was buying fruit from a market in China. When I gently corrected the stallholder – who had informed his neighbour I was American – he waved an airy arm, gave me a cheery smile with his betel-nut stained teeth and said: “Same thing.” Even if I’d known enough Chinese to protest, I was too busy spluttering with incredulous indignation to utter a syllable.
Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre, is intended to reveal the absurdity of all such offensive stereotyping through ridicule. The only trouble is that not all of the – overwhelmingly snow-white and snowy-haired – England people in the audience seemed to be signed up to the play’s liberal agenda. On Friday 27 February the big laughs came not at the pointed critique of past prejudice but at the racist jokes offered up as examples of it. Rows of people who sat in buttock-clenched silence at official taboo words like Paki and Yid relaxed into peals of Daily Mail-sponsored belly whooping at this gem: ‘Jews and Irish? That’s the worst kind of marriage! You end up with a family of pissed-up burglars managed by a clever accountant.’ The inference is clear enough: some racisms are more racist than others.
Bean cannot control who turns up and, as this production is part of the Travelex £10 season, there is no reason to stereotype the audience based on one fogey-filled night.
England People is a very abridged romp through English history which hones in on four successive waves of immigration into Bethnal Green. The story is told through the framing device of asylum seekers in a detention centre who are staging a play to pass the time while they wait for their envelopes from the Home Office.
The production is greatly enhanced by some of the best multimedia work I have seen at the National. A simple two-storey set is continually transformed by clever projector work and excellent lights and sound: Romans, Saxons, Danes, Beatles, Skinheads and the Luftwaffe are conjured from nowhere and consigned to history before you can say “They all look the same.”
A pattern is very soon established whereby each new set of migrants is fiercely resented by the descendants of the previous incomers to the tune of: ‘Comin’ over ‘ere, takin’ ahr jobs…’ The exceptions to the antipathy are Sacha Dhawan and Michelle Terry who dance around each other as a sort of time-travelling Tony and Maria while the centuries flit by.
There is plenty of raucous, slapstick humour of the kind at which the late Benny Hill will be nodding in approval from his grave but all the laughs, even the constant conjuring of Redbridge as the promised land, cannot blot out the undercurrent of violence and resentment that makes all the characters – regardless of ethnicity – want to leave Bethnal Green in the end.
It is depressing, not reassuring, that these same patterns of suspicion and intolerance are repeated every time newcomers arrive. Or it should be. Daniel Defoe points out in his, poem printed in the program: A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction in a country formed from time immemorial by immigration.
“I haven’t been offended yet,” said one spritely be-blazered old boy brightly, while making his way to the bar for an interval G & T. Here’s hoping.
England People Very Nice is at National Theatre until the end of June 2009 – Listings info
