Testing the Echo is one of those plays where you only find out what the title refers to halfway through. In this case it’s a reference to a spoof question for the government’s much pilloried citizenship test for would-be Britons. It seems unnecessary to invent spurious questions when hardly any native and to the manner born Brits know how wide the country is at its narrowest point (65 miles from South Shields to Gretna) or how many members there are in the House of Lords (738). God Bless Google.
David Edgar’s extraordinary collaboration with Out of Joint is a dramatised debate about the meaning of Britishness. Its focal point is an ESOL class preparing to sit the citizenship test and the interweaving stories of its students and teacher. The students all have very different reasons for wishing to gain citizenship: ‘taking our jobs’ and benefit fraud do not feature. The verb gain is appropriate because, no matter how ridiculous the test procedure and how pompous the oath ceremony may be, citizenship makes a real and tangible difference to each of the characters’ lives: one can escape an abusive relationship, another will see his children again and a third’s father will be proud of him. Their teacher, Emma, (played brilliantly by Teresa Banham) has perhaps the longest journey. Her middle-class Merlot mindset and liberal principles are shaken by an absorbing and ongoing clash with the fervency of the beliefs of a Muslim student.
In addition to the ESOL class the 8 performers pull off an incredible kaleidoscope of other characters and scenarios with little more than rehearsal furniture and basic props. The mastery of the array of accents used is especially useful in resisting any accusation of glib portrayals of Daily Mail stereotypes about asylum seekers: every speaker, however minor, has an authentic story to tell in his or her own voice. Farzana Dua Elahe is particularly impressive; transforming at will from Kosovan bombshell to Brummie schoolgirl to ministry apparatchik and back again.
The action takes place in front of a giant projector screen on which an array of images, announcements and blog posts appear. The screen is useful in that it provides additional information / entertainment whilst the actors change between scenarios but it can also be an irritating distraction.
An uninterrupted hour and forty five minutes is not a long slot but, if anything, there is too much drama and too much debate in Testing the Echo. Such is the pace of Matthew Dunster’s relentless production that there’s never a second to spare to savour even the moments of highest tension. The very moving stories of Emma and her students get swept away in a maelstrom of sound and images.
This may be the point of course, it may be impossible to pin down what Britishness is when there’s just too much going on around the subject.
Testing the Echo runs until 3 May at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn, London.
