The Stage

England People Very Nice

Published Thursday 12 February 2009 at 11:40 by William McEvoy

Richard Bean’s large-scale new comedy about the history of immigration to London is by turns hilarious, irreverent, caricatural and crude. Subtle it is not. But what it loses in political insight, it gains in anarchic energy, broad brush comic dialogue and cartoonish boldness.

We’ve seen the set up before in Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good - detainees rehearsing a play - only here, they are a group of multi-national immigrants waiting to find out if they’ve been allowed to stay in Britain. Cut to the play proper, which charts the waves of immigrants - French Huguenot weavers, Galway Irish, Eastern European and Russian Jews and Bangladeshis, who transform Bethnal Green and Spitalfields into a place of cultural interaction and conflict.

What rollicking fun it all is, linked by an inter-racial love story that leaps from generation to generation. No group, from Hampstead liberals to extremist Imams, goes unparodied. The characters are a set of memorable comic grotesques, with Sophie Stanton particularly outstanding as ballsy, casually racist East End barmaid Ida.

But this is an ensemble piece, directed with consummate flair by Nicholas Hytner - with Pete Bishop’s wonderful, Monty Pythonesque animations as its backdrop.

This show will divide people. Not pious enough for some, too like a Carry On Up the East End for others, it’s theatre in a celebratory popular form which sees comedy as the solvent that dissolves the static ideologies and cultural taboos that bind us.