“I’m left, I’m liberal and I’m losing,” says Ahir Shah, but with this new show, Control, he’s not going down without a fight. It’s a piledriver hour about the rise of authoritarianism, and the eclipse of the liberal values many of us took for granted. It’s not uplifting: those looking for good cheer should look elsewhere. Shah finds plenty of laughs in the benighted state of the world, and his reaction to it – but alarm, not amusement, is the keynote. Shah is horrified, and angry, and he’s not soft-soaping that for easy laughs.
The opening stages are deceptive, as Shah warns against tarring Leave voters as racists. As his vegan-who-likes-Nando’s analogy proves, you can join bad teams for innocent reasons. But the tenor of the show contradicts this equable introduction. The deeper Shah drills into Trumpism and the nativist landscape, the more he finds racism at its root. “Take this country back” begs the question “from whom?” – and Shah thinks the answer’s obvious. Fashionable political ideas about “the common man” and the “victims of globalisation” are just code, he argues, for wanting a white monoculture.
At its best, this – and the wider analysis of our divided, dysfunctional times – comes across as coruscating comedy. Shah ratchets up the dismay to thermonuclear levels, at the degree to which the old keep shafting the young (cue a droll forecast of the next generational battleground), BBC balance, and Britain’s willed ignorance of its imperial history. He’s fiercely well-informed, anchors everything in his own experiences as a non-white Briton feeling the heat rise, and deploys an amusingly simplistic sour-milk motif to dramatise our compulsion to repeat the mistakes of the past.
No effort is made to plot a route out of our predicament. At points, I felt he was too cynical, writing off Corbyn’s Labour and derisive of the (legitimate?) concerns that fed Trump and Brexit. But then, a refusal to do what he’s told and “be understanding” is what’s driving this show – which is, more than anything, a call to arms, a warning against complacency. That may mean he sometimes sounds high-handed, and bitter. But as this combative hour of political comedy makes clear, Shah – and the rest of us – have more important things than that to worry about.
• At Laughing Horse @ Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh, until 27 August. Box office: 0131-226 0026.
