What is unsayable in the 21st century? That’s the question that propels the Royal Shakespeare Company’s provocative Making Mischief festival of new work, talks and debates, which reminds us that the RSC doesn’t – and never should – simply rely on a classical repertoire to address the contemporary.
Somalia Seaton, a young playwright whose next play, House, will be heading to Edinburgh and then London’s Yard theatre in September in a production by Clean Break, certainly responds to the challenge with fearlessness. Nadia Latif’s sparky production of Seaton’s play gets to the core of our fractured society and the divisions and tensions that lurk beneath its polite veneer.
Sally is a 39-year-old white teacher in a sixth-form college. She thinks of herself as a nice, liberal person. The kind of person who abhors racism, has black friends and casts herself as an intelligent, independent modern woman. She has let her relationship with her long-time boyfriend, Archie, drift, is accepting of his belittling sexism, and has a nagging sense of discontent. But she feels that she is doing her bit by helping her students, particularly 17-year-old Aisha.
Aisha is a whip-smart black student who was suspended for writing a blog about racism that the college claimed was divisive, but she’s now back at college and Sally is eager to help. But when Aisha turns up at Sally’s flat one night covered in blood, old wounds are re-opened.
Which is worse, asks Seaton: the overt racism of St George’s flag-waving Little Englanders who pine nostalgically for a mythical England of steak and kidney pies and friendly milkmen? Or the disguised racism of a middle-class white liberal who says all the right things but who allows their own privilege to go unchecked by refusing to recognise that it was built on the back of colonialism? Or those who consistently fail to notice and protest the casual daily racism faced by many of the population?
Set against a background of the government’s Prevent strategy, which demands that teachers must report any evidence of extremism that they believe they see in their students’ behaviour, and politicians spouting slogans about British values and raising anxiety by talking about “war on home soil” with “enemies who sound just like us”, Seaton’s play doesn’t quite hold at the centre, not least because despite the efforts of Laura Howard the passivity of Sally makes the role seem underwritten. We need to like her more before she reveals herself.
But this is a fierce, pulsating and galvanising play that makes you sit up and take notice both of its writer and its message, and there’s a blistering central performance from Donna Banya as Aisha, whose burning anger sets the city alight as she reframes and reclaims what we mean by “Our England”.
- At the Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 27 August. Box office: 01789 403493.
