“They’re all the same, aren’t they?” is the laziest of racist remarks. It sounds bland and glib but it cuts to the quick when it’s applied to you. I am a white British male and have only been on the receiving end once: I was buying fruit from a market in China. When I gently corrected the stallholder -– who had informed his neighbour I was American –- he waved an airy arm, gave me a cheery smile with his betel-nut stained teeth and said: “Same thing.” Even if I’d known enough Chinese to protest, I was too busy spluttering with incredulous indignation to utter a syllable.
Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice, directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre, is intended to reveal through ridicule the absurdity of all such offensive stereotyping. The only trouble is that not all of the overwhelmingly snow-white, snowy-haired "England people" in the audience seemed to be signed up to the play’s liberal agenda. On Friday 27th February the big laughs came not at the pointed critique of past prejudice but at the racist jokes offered up as examples of it. Rows of people who sat in buttock-clenched silence at official taboo words like Paki and Yid relaxed into peals of Daily Mail sponsored belly whooping at this gem: "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." The inference is clear enough: some racisms are more racist than others.
Bean cannot control who turns up and, as this production is part of the Travelex £10 season, there is no reason to stereotype the audience based on one fogey-filled night.
England People is a very abridged romp through English history which hones in on four successive waves of immigration into Bethnal Green. The story is told through the framing device of asylum seekers in a detention centre who are staging a play to pass the time while they wait for their envelopes from the Home Office.
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