England People Far Too Nice

(July 2009)

England People Very Nice, which I saw at The National Theatre in March. Fair enough – after all, they came over ‘ere with their looms, takin’ aaah jobs. Fast forward a couple of hundred years and the barmaid, East Ender to the core, despite her Huguenot blood, now rails against  “F*ckin’ Micks”, the bog-trotting Irish immigrants who keep pigs in their lodgings and mate with their brothers and sisters – “at least you know where they’ve been”. Next up are “F*ckin’ Yids”; refugees from the pogroms receive a less than warm welcome. But love conquers all, and the Irish girl who is now as Cockney as they come, marries a Mr Klineman: “Jews and Irish? That’s the worst kind of marriage! You end up with a family of pissed-up burglars managed by a clever accountant.” Bawdy humour and an undertone of menace save the first half of this play from being a Zadie-Smith-meets-United-Colours-of-Benetton multicultural mush, but it is not yet saying anything new. Mocking of both stereotypes and stereotyping, so far the play is scrupulously even-handed in its offensiveness, and will therefore offend only those determined to be offended. Then, in the second half, come the “F*ckin Pakis”.

“It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot, Mum” accent, its representative, Mushi, is Muslim in name only. But sometimes a name is all it takes: he has not renounced Islam, and his children want more than a name. “They’re like bloody Arabs,” he says, tellingly, of his niqabbed daughters. I thought back to my childhood in Bolton, when Muslim girls dressed, if not like Westerners, in the colourful shalwar kameez of their Hindu friends. Their daughters dress Saudi-style, as black ghosts, and they don’t have Hindu friends.

Jihad Made in Britain. Click on the “sistas” below to read the Pajamas Media article, in which I discuss the modest Muslimah of today. 

My Son the Fanatic covered similar ground ten years ago. However, as the title suggests, Kureishi portrayed a devout Muslim as a “fanatical” exception. Bean, more realistically, sees fanaticism as the norm for a younger, emboldened generation of Muslims.

Seven Jewish Children being a prime example – are ten a penny. England People Very Nice has more about it. Scattered in the first half, hit and miss with its jokes, seemingly comforting in its demonstration that we can all rub along in the end, it comes into its own in the second half. Its unflinching portrayal of Muslim youth, very modern, very British, and yet alien to the core, deserves praise.

The Iconoclast. From the Evening Standard article quoted:

 

A play that empathises with the 7/7 bombers is coming to London after a string of theatres rejected it.

The show, called Pornography, follows a man from Leeds travelling to the capital to commit an act of terrorism on the Tube, and six Londoners caught up in the attack. The play . . . set in July 2005 on the backdrop of the real events. It is made up of seven “playlets”, interweaving characters’ stories in the run-up to the bombings.

 
The playwright’s words do not augur well. As a reader points out, we don’t need permission to think of the victims as human beings. My colleague Esmerelda Weatherwax is sceptical, and with good reason:

Actually Kent is right but not in the way he thinks. Understanding the ruthlessness of jihad and the aim of world submission is indeed the first step to defeating it.

staged at The National. From The Times:

Fourteen years on, the book stands up as an eerie warning from history, a debate about integration and identity politics, about art and fundamentalism, about racism and terrorism.

Set in 1989, against the backdrop of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Black Album follows Shahid, a teenager from a middle-class family in Kent, who comes to a shabby polytechnic in northwest London to take a degree in cultural studies. He finds himself pulled between different worlds. There is the lure of sex, drugs and culture from his rapacious thirtysomething tutor Deedee, with whom he has an affair. There is the lure of the drug-dealing underworld from his bullying, ultra-Thatcherite brother Chili. And there is the lure of religion from Riaz, a devout and hospitable neighbour in his halls of residence.

It is the portrayal of Riaz and his band of Islamists that seems particularly prescient, not least because of the spooky parallels with the quartet of young men responsible for the 7/7 attrocities.

metaphor-mangling Times writer said of J. G. Ballard, “had its finger on the Zeitgeist”?

And what about the theatre as counter-Jihad? Every Shakespeare play, every Greek tragedy, every bawdy Restoration comedy is an assault on Islam, hostile as that ideology is to such expressions of the human spirit. How far theatre can influence public attitudes is an open question, but it can inform, and should not mislead. I will be seeing Pornography and The Black Album this summer, and will report back for New English Review. And unlike the husband of our former Home Secretary, I will not claim the cost of Pornography from the taxpayer.

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