England People Very Nice by Richard Bean at the National Theatre, London. Tickets £10-20. Running till the end of April.

Reviewed by Piers Mostyn

This three hour play about the history of Bethnal Green as seen through its successive migrant communities is without doubt topical.

The first half is a raucous roller-coaster through 3 centuries of migration. Cleverly projected animations onto a movable set allow for continuous transformations between street scene, pub, place of worship and workplace. Told through wittily sharp set piece scenes, it is a “Beginner’s Guide to the East End.” 18th century French Huguenot refugees are followed by 19th century Irish fleeing famine, East European Jewish pogrom victims and finally the Bengali communities of contemporary times.

A cycle occurs with each wave: migrants arrive poor, hungry and ill-adapted to the new environment; the host community reacts largely negatively based on perceptions of cultural difference and economic threat; integration follows and the migrant community then joins the baying mobs reacting to the next “invasion”.

If nothing else, this provides an accessible, if over-simplified, historical context for considering today’s controversies – redefining English working class identity as a geological accumulation of generations of such strata, each contributing skills, culture and economic energy.

The staging is astonishing. The 26-strong cast (each playing multiple roles) is taken through a multitude of scene changes – sometimes at a rate of one a minute with an effortless dynamism by director Nicholas Hytner.

One of several threads is a series of comic sketches in an unchanging pub scene with unchanging characters engaging in Alf Garnett-style reactionary banter that, as centuries roll past, sound ever more absurd.

On the plus side, Bean makes some effort to present the migrant communities as far from homogenous: divided by class, gender and politics. And they constantly evolve through internal dynamics and interaction with the world.

One example is the portrayal of a historically true protest on Yom Kippur in 1904 by East End Jewish anarchists, who pelted rabbis in their frocks and finery with bacon sandwiches.

But the down-side is that the cartoon-like portraits necessary to achieve this broad historical sweep, often descend to caricature – relying on stereotype and leaving some disturbing loose ends on vital questions of racism and imperialism.

The 19th century Irish are presented as either peasant drunkards, prone to incest and sleeping with their pigs or isolated middle class sons of the enlightenment. Fair enough, this mirrors Friedrich Engels portrait in “The Condition of the Working Class in England”. But 150 years has passed since then. Clearly England People is intended as a racy tale, laced with irony – not a po-faced didactic tract. But this rankled.

Any grand historical narrative will necessarily be selective. But the play seemed to be foregrounding “identity politics” – in particular the religious identity of the communities. This is emphasised by a second thread, alongside the pub sketches, reciting the history of the “La Neuve Eglise” on Fournier Street and Brick Lane. Established in 1743 by Huguenots, converted to a Catholic place of worship, then a synagogue before becoming the Jamme Masjid or Great London Mosque in 1974.

Social, political and historical context is downplayed. The British Empire barely features and class is little more than a footnote. There is little sense of the great working class movements, all of which played a central role in East End history and many of them led by the migrant communities – from Chartism to the rise of mass unionism, the Suffragettes, 1930s anti-fascist struggles and anti-colonialism.

As a result the radicals in the story tend to be middle class do-gooders largely isolated from mass movement or struggle – although in one exception striking Irish dockers are encouraged to form a united front with Jewish tailors.

Whilst this weakness may be explained as a necessary compromise in making the complex narrative accessible in the first half, it is unsustainable in the second half.

This deals with the burgeoning Bengali community of the post-war period, fast forwarding to contemporary times. No longer racing through the centuries and hopping from one community to the next, this was an opportunity to engage with the complexities of the situation with some sensitivity.

Certainly the community is presented as differentiated: young and old, observant and non-observant Muslims, the mosque goers aren’t all stereotyped as “fundamentalist”. But there is no sense of historical development behind the making of today’s community. The 40 years from the late 60s zips by with youths on the street tackling racists one moment (the 1970s) and then suddenly its 9/11.

Muslim radicalisation seems to come out of nowhere, with people suddenly objecting to alcohol and short skirts for no apparent reason other than religious fervour. This culminates in a pivotal scene involving an imam with hooks instead of arms – an obvious caricature of Abu Hamza, who in fact preached at Finsbury Park and had no association with Bethnal Green as far as I am aware. Whatever its intentions this was stereotyping that collapsed any sophisticated understanding of the issues.

There was no political context to this development – no mass anti-fascist movement in the 1970s (the ANL carnival that went through the East End), no decline in the community’s traditional backing for Labour as it drifted rightwards, no “war on terror” or assault on civil liberties, no invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq, no anti-war radicalisation.

Instead 21st century Bethnal Green politics was presented as a (historically false) polarisation between BNP supporting racists and Muslim fundamentalists with little between bar a few despairing individuals. No political alternative was posed: certainly not a radical secular party arising out of the anti-war movement.

Racist ideology – particularly the mythology that asylum seekers obtain preferential treatment in housing applications – was presented, but went unchallenged within the play. This along with the absence of a political response to or alternative to the BNP was difficult to understand in a play clearly nailing its colours to an anti-racist and pro-immigration mast.

The implicit message, I eventually grasped, was that just as previous migrant waves went from being perceived as threatening, were met with violence, but were eventually integrated, reconciled and tolerated, so too would this one. On this interpretation, the play is provocatively goading the audience into stereotyping today’s migrants in the hope it will then wake up to and apply the lessons of the first part of the play.

Apart from the obvious inherent dangers in this approach, one implication is that political intervention is not necessary as the historical cycle will inevitably complete itself once more.

This was reinforced by a third running thread in which inter-racial love ultimately breaks down the barriers through an inevitable process toward integration. In the final scenes a Bengali man and white woman marry.

It barely needs stating that this romantic historical determinism is hardly tenable. Apart from anything else, there is no guarantee that history will repeat itself and not end with a pogrom. It wasn’t sex between the races but mass struggle that brought down apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow in the American south.

The whole production was a play within a play. The performance book-ended by discussions among the cast about its short-comings – an unusual theatrical device that encouraged the audience to take a similarly critical perspective.

And this was given a cunning twist by the fact that the cast was itself made up from detainees in an immigration centre waiting to find out whether they would obtain leave to remain or be deported. The musical score – lurching between klezmer, reels and bhangra – was played by uniformed camp guards.

Despite the critique, this play is worth a visit, if only for the heated discussion that is likely at interval time and the end.

Perhaps the last word should lie with Daniel Defoe whose poem “True Born Englishman”, reprinted in the highly informative programme, can hardly be improved upon 308 years later.

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

That het ‘rogneous thing, an Englishman:

In eager rapes and furious lust begot,

Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.

Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,

And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:

From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came.

With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.

In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,

Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.

While their rank daughters, to their parents just.

Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.

This nauseous brood directly did contain

The well-extracted blood of Englishmen

The wonder which remains is at our pride,

To value that which all wise men deride.

For Englishmen to boast of generation,

Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,

In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

A banter made to be a test of fools,

Which those that use it justly ridicules.

A metaphor invented to express

A man a-kin to all the universe.