Playing With Fire

Published Friday 23 September 2005 at 16:05 by John Thaxter

David Edgar’s first ‘state of the nation’ report was delivered back in 1977 when the RSC staged Destiny, his drama depicting the race divide, local politics and the rise of British fascism, sparked by immigration and the loss of Empire.

As a chronicler of our times he now looks at the strained relations between old Labour’s northern strongholds and the modernising zeal of Downing Street. He sets this against a backdrop of the growing tension between white and Asian communities, which led to pitched battles by disaffected Muslim youths against the police in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford four years ago, before returning home to cruise their jihad websites.

His context for this often confusing docudrama is a public enquiry into the race riots in the fictional Yorkshire borough of ‘Wyverdale’, an offstage outbreak of violence which coincides with a Blairite multi-ethnic celebration of St George’s Day and a protest march by right-wing activists mourning the death of a white youth killed in an Asian attack.

Carefully researched, it makes for a tough evening of theatre in which New Labour technobabble comes head to head with blunt talking councillors, brilliantly led by David Troughton as the bluff leader of the council, backed by Northern sideswipes from Trevor Cooper as a pipe-sucking socialist.

Battling on behalf of John Prescott’s office is Emma Fielding’s chic but querulous civil servant, a sometime warrior for Stepney Women Against Racism, making prostitution as her first line of attack. In the evening’s sole concession to personal politics, she enters into an unwise affair with Paul Bhattacharjee’s ambitious Bangladeshi bureaucrat.

Michael Attenborough, no stranger to staging Edgar’s work, provides a heavily populated cityscape of committee rooms and debating chambers, hotel foyer, corridor encounters and windswept streets and squares. But the most intriguing character is Oliver Ford Davies as a sacked Labour refusenik who sets himself up as the elected Mayoral candidate in what looks very like a sly dig at Ken Livingstone.

The production is the last of this year’s Travelex £10 season.