England People Very Nice?

ENGLAND PEOPLE VERY NICE, at the National Theatre, London SE1 By John Southgate England People Very Nice England People Very Nice is designedly not very nice. Funny, sharp, chaotic, focused; but not very nice. Set for the sake of irony in an immigration detention centre, where the inmates are putting on a play – this play – it runs through the centuries of alien immigration into Bethnal Green. Pantomime Huguenots, Irish, Jews, Bengalis and Somalis arrive, get assimilated or not as the case may be, and are replaced by the next wave. Each lot is presented with much political incorrectness but without malice. The French are absurdly amorous; the Irish keep pigs in their houses and can’t see what’s wrong with incest; the Jews sing “Oi vay” in the sweatshops; the Bengalis throw together a hideous mixture of ingredients and invent chicken tikka masala. The point is, of course, that this is how these incomers have been successively stereotyped. The malice – and this is where it gets serious – comes in each generation from the violent, xenophobic, foul-mouthed, indigenous local working class. In reaction to it, revolutionary anarchism and Zionism take hold among the Jewish immigrants, then Islamic fundamentalism among the Bengalis and Somalis. These are political arguments offered in the form of a folk or morality play. The problem is that some of them are bad and dangerous arguments – which is not to say for a moment that audiences need protecting from them. Thus we are shown housing being given to immigrants, as a matter of council policy, in preference to local people – a myth propagated by the far right (whose orator gets a good showing), when what east London councils were in constant trouble for in those years was doing the exact reverse. But we also get inter-ethnic conflict and the painful business of assimilation and non-assimilation, both of them real. Through the burlesque two dramatic threads run. One is the voice of the solitary Afro-Caribbean, who sits in the pub cheerfully forecasting rivers of blood as successive waves of immigrants arrive, and who finally gives up and returns to Barbados. The other, a complex and less bleak one, is the Romeo and Juliet story: in each generation a local girl falls in love with an incomer but is kept from him by ambient hostility or circumstance. But Shakespeare can eat his heart out: in this play they finally get together, have twins, fight off the mosque’s attempt to take the boy and move with the in-laws to a semi in Redbridge. The writer’s tongue finishes where it began – in his cheek. * England People Very Nice runs at the National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 until 9 August 2009. Info: 7452 3000/ Tickets/ England People Very Nice

 Printable version