Comment on National Theatre's England People Very Nice

Published: 06/03/2009

England People Very Nice and Naïve
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

It took me days to decide what I thought of the controversial England People Very Nice at the National. My impressions shape-shifted, twisted and turned confusedly. What I might have said about the play in the first forty eight hours didn’t make sense on subsequent days. It was a bit like the regret and wisdom that follow the thrilling kick of a really hot curry. I wonder now about critics who scribble reviews but hours after they scurry off from press nights. Would recollection in tranquillity or time make a significant difference to their judgements?

The play is simple, simplistic even, though technically impressive and with a sparkling cast of many. Hogarth and Terry Gilliam come together and have a huge laugh, sail through the waves of different migrants who, through centuries, have arrived in Bethnal Green. The script is sharp though some lines sound too much like stand up comic gags. Writer Bean and director Nicholas Hytner have staged the romp with élan. Nothing more than that, although Hytner once claimed his production would’ address the issue of Islam very vigorously’- a vain promise. There is no obvious attempt to expose what lies beneath the fast waters sweeping along, no unexpected dive below the surface.

Perhaps those involved were having too much fun to mull and muse on the effect of their work. A number of reviews approve of the un-PC bravura and verve but key critics say the work is full of malevolent caricatures, racial stereotypes and ( more seriously) that it lacks humanity. Anti-racist artists and activists have been protesting and have not been mollified by a ( I suspect) hastily arranged Q&A session with the writer and director.

Is the play racist? No. The BNP would not enjoy it much. White working class East End blokes are not romantic defenders of the realm- just crude thugs. Besides what does that slur say about the intelligent, multiracial cast with actors like Rudi Dharmalingam, Sacha Dhawan? We rarely see this talent on such stages. Yet there is indeed much I do object to in the show. Words that are now rightly excised from public discourse- ‘Paki’ ‘Yid’ etc are revived here with panache. Audiences laugh at the jokiness of the revival and later some may feel they conspired with something nasty and reprehensible. I wonder why I laughed at the coarse depiction of the Irish , jolly rape scenes, sinister and or superstitious mullahs and a happy ending which has a bigamous Bangladeshi man smiling with his white and brown families in an English suburb.

Just because we are free to offend, doesn’t make it a duty for arts establishments to make sure they do to raise a laugh or appear brave. Is our National ITALS PREVIOUS Theatre rehabilitating the words so they re-enter the most polite circles of the nation? There were no jokes about the Holocaust I noticed and a good thing too.

We are going through another cycle of anti-immigrant xenophobia, last seen back in the early seventies when Enoch Powell was a hero. Our government, pushed by some tabloids is hard on asylum seekers and migrants and a new report shows how even asylum children are now seen as a menace to be deported. There can be two reasons why Hyner and Bean are baffled by the hostility they have generated. Either they share at some unconscious level some of the prejudices they show on stage- which I simply do not believe. Or, from where they sit, they do not understand the social habitat as it is at the moment. Their play could validate hostility faced by incomers or –worse- presents that pain as a rite of passage before winning acceptance. Hytner had hoped the work would not be a ‘controversy magnet’. England people very naïve.

Published in The Independent