England People Very Nice
Olivier
Toyer
Arts
It’s been a busy year for offence-junkies. Richard Bean’s new play has prompted anti-racism protests at the National. What for? The play is certainly racist in the narrow sense that it mocks the distinctions between races (or regions, for the most part, since Bean belongs to the same Aryan race as the Irish, French, eastern Europeans and Indians he mocks in this play). And he uses a strange device to pre-empt the outrage-vendors. We open in a detention centre where a group of asylum-seekers are, rather improbably, rehearsing a pageant that tells the history of migration to Britain. Cut to the play. The scene is Spitalfields, east London. From the 17th century onward we watch successive waves of immigrants as they face up to the prejudice, hostility and violence of the native population. The Huguenots, the Irish, the eastern European Jews, the Bangladeshis of the 20th century and finally, in recent years, the white yuppy refugees hounded out of Hampstead by their inability to raise a mortgage.
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