Bizarre and outdated: Word-Play at the Royal Court reviewed            

The Royal Court’s new topical satire, Word-Play, opens with a gaffe-prone Tory prime minister giving a TV interview in which he commends Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. The Downing Street press team suffer a meltdown as they struggle to draft an apology or a retraction. Opposition parties try to profit from the blunder and the PM’s words spread across the globe and earn him praise from various authoritarian governments, led by China.

This opening scene makes sense only if the British prime minister is a white male named Boris but the author, Rabiah Hussain, hasn’t troubled to update her script in the light of recent developments. The result is a topical play that feels like ancient history. Hussain seems unaware that Powell’s speech, made in 1968, led to his dismissal from the shadow cabinet by Ted Heath. And apparently no one has told her that Heath was the prime minister who later welcomed Asian refugees after their deportation from Uganda by Idi Amin. Her show prefers the fanciful idea that Powell represents mainstream Conservative politics and she wants to commemorate and even to preserve racism, as if it were a virtue.

The script is arranged as a heap of disconnected sketches that might be performed in any order. There’s a scene in a Romford sitting room involving a couple of Essex dimwits who repetitively praise the ‘wonderfulness’ of Britain. Next, we move to a north London dinner party where four rich migrants of Asian heritage start to swear and scream about Bangladeshi cuisine. Next, the actors sprawl around on bean bags, texting each other and exchanging meaningless remarks. Then, in an interactive scene, three performers eating ice creams take up spare seats in the auditorium and praise the quality of the Royal Court’s confectionary supplier.