Well you cannot accuse Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre of ignoring the deepest fissures in British society.
As Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice — with its hilarious ethnic stereotypes of oy veying Chasids, agricultural Irish, bone-headed English and militant Islamists — nears the end of its run, up pops Hanif Kureishi’s adaptation of his 1993 novel.
As with Bean’s play, this too is an East End tale. Its hero is Shahid, a well-spoken British Asian student from Kent who arrives in London to do an HND in post-colonial literature.
It’s 1989, Thatcher is in power, Rushdie’s Satanic Verses has been published, Iran is about to announce its Fatwa and Shahid, the son of a first-generation, hardworking Pakistani family, is being buffeted by the forces of Western liberalism and Eastern fundamentalism.
Kureishi describes his novel as a pre-7/7 book. And in that respect, the work is a stunningly prescient recognition of the potency of Islam and its effect on British and Western societies well before the media, the chattering classes, MI5, and the white Anglo Saxon majority in this country were aware of it.
More’s the pity then that Kureishi’s politically astute exploration is bound up with the 32-year-old Asian and cross-cultural theatre company Tara Arts and a production whose uneven acting is at best good but at worst bad; whose vision is at best rambling, at worst unfocused; whose tone is at best satirical and at worst, not just uncertain but downright adolescent.
Set within the white walls of Shahid’s East London pad, which serve also as screens for Tim Hately’s moderately successful location-changing video projections, Jatinder Verma’s tragical-historical and tragical-comical production just doesn’t know what animal it wants to be.
It’s populated by off-the-shelf ciphers who each represent a type of politics rather than actual people. There’s Deedee, Shahid’s flame-haired, free-spirited tutor who represents Western liberalism; there’s Riaz, the leader of an emerging group of Islamists emboldened by racist attacks; and a Marxist lecturer called Brownlow who has developed a stutter since the collapse of Communism. He is the embodiment of left-wing tolerance of Islamic intolerance — all in the name of multiculturalism and anti-racism.
There’s also a vampish Pakistani aunt, a punk drug dealer who for some reason bounces around the stage and Hat the naïf, who, unlike our hero Shahid, chooses martyrdom and murder instead of art and dialogue.
As a lesson in modern British history, Kureishi’s play is a useful reminder of how Thatcher’s Britain viewed the discontent of Muslims as a little local difficulty that happened to be on its doorstep, but would pass.
But dramatically it is populated by people whose fate we could hardly care less about.
Keep prodding yourself with the reminder that this is your country, that these are our people and this our society and you might just care a little more. But that is the job of the play, not the audience.