England People Very Nice
National Theatre, London
STEREOTYPES are deadly: before you can kill someone, you have to dehumanise them – and that’s what stereotypes do. But can they also subvert our prejudices? Richard Bean’s new comic epic, England People Very Nice, is an eye-popping account of immigration, always a theme in which stereotypes figure strongly. Starting with cavemen, Romans, Saxons and Vikings, Bean soon settles down to tell the story of migration to the East End of London over some 400 years, from yesteryear’s French Huguenots to today’s Bangladeshis and Somalis. Caught in this historical sweep are Irish fleeing famine and Jews ducking pogroms.
Each new group of arrivals faces the same problem: the native English, themselves the descendants of immigrants, respond with violent protest. They deny the migrants housing and jobs, and attack their culture. However, in Bean’s humanistic vision, it is sex that overcomes prejudice, and he shows how, in each new phase of migration, a Romeo and Juliet couple prove that the sexual hots are stronger than the joyless desperation of hatred.
In the second half, where the rapid canter through the national past settles down to a trot through post-Second World War British history, the Bangladeshi Mushi and the local Deborah, descended from all the other peoples that have settled in the East End, are drawn to each other against a background of decolonisation, Suez, Enoch Powell and assorted other instances of racial hatred. This story, a mythical fable, offers an optimistic ending – this is, after all, a comedic adventure.
The centre of the action, which spills roly-poly across the National Theatre’s massive Olivier stage, is a pub, and every age sees the same down-to-earth barmaid offering her locals the wisdom of the beer-pump. But if the emotional core of the play is the pleasure of drink as much as the power of love, most of the entertainment comes from Bean’s wildly provocative jokes – a jolly vomiting of all the stereotypes of national identity in one gigantic splurge. Most challenging, perhaps, is his inclusion of recent conflicts between Muslim traditionalists and the new breed of militant.
Although it’s certainly a sign of cultural confidence that the National can field such a wide range of insults, such a relentless parade of caricature and cliché, the play can be uncomfortable to watch. Is it okay to laugh at past prejudice when today’s xenophobia is so much less funny?
By staging England People Very Nice, artistic director Nicholas Hytner, who also directs this show, is clearly making a statement about both what the National is and how it sees the nation. By offering this comedic riot, it proclaims itself as a palace of popular entertainment; by lavishing so much energy on this play, it suggests that what distinguishes the English is the fact that we are funny.
It’s not the worst national characteristic to be lumbered with, but it can make for a long evening, as one spectacular vulgarity succeeds another and one lurid stereotype tumbles behind another across the stage. Bean has cleverly put his epic in quotation marks by making clear that it is being performed by the inmates of an immigration centre, and this offers a contrast with current migration policies.
There is also a strong sense of national pride, most clearly evidenced in the Blitz scene and in the episode when chicken tikka masala, now our national dish, is invented. Such national myths are represented with belly laughs and lashings of foul language, and a huge cast, energetically led by Sophie Stanton as the barmaid, with Sacha Dhawan and Michelle Terry as the star-crossed lovers, create a cartoon vision of a mongrel nation past and present, greatly helped by Pete Bishop’s comic animations. The result is joyous, crude and very, very English.
Aleks Sierz
