The Broadway Theatre in Barking opened its Spin the Election festival with a one-off performance of Anders Lustgarten’s ground-breaking play about the rise of the BNP, A Day at the Racists. An altogether different play is currently running at the Royal Court in west London with an attack on the privileged ruling classes at its heart. Posh by Laura Wade is centered on the ‘Riot Club’, an Oxford University dining society for aristocrats who rage against the loss of an idealised England they believe once belonged to them. Both plays have much to say about the current state of Britain and have powerful political messages that are lent further gravitas by the proximity of the general election.
A Day at the Racists is particularly provocative because Barking is in real danger of becoming a BNP-controlled council; Nick Griffin is running for MP and in the last election his party ran for 13 seats and won 12, in this election they are running 34 candidates and they only need 26 seats to take the Council. Taking the recent change in BNP party-membership rules to its logical conclusion, the play shows a certain prescience in having a British Pakistani woman, Gina, running the BNP election campaign for the Barking and Dagenham constituency. Gina is believable and charismatic; she avoids the opprobrious BNP ideology and concentrates on policy to address the legitimate concerns of Pete, a working-class and disaffected Labour supporter.
Gina’s promise to overhaul the housing allocation system to give priority to long-time residents strikes a chord with Pete whose son and young granddaughter are living his front room. This is a real concern affecting the borough and, as was made apparent in the Q&A session which followed the performance; residents feel that these are the issues that need to be addressed and have not been dealt with by the current government. The first half of the play is powerful because Gina seems to offer a reasonable way out; we allow ourselves to understand, even for the briefest of moments, why Pete might perceive the BNP to be a real alternative.
Pete is a loveable everyman seduced by Gina’s energy and the solutions she offers to his problems, but he is also seduced by Gina herself and this is where the play is at its weakest. In the second half it becomes apparent that a unique set of circumstances have led to Pete’s entanglement with the BNP – his attraction to Gina and her involvement in securing a flat for his son, Mark. More worrying still is that the only thing that finally discredits the BNP in Pete’s eyes is the incitement of racist violence by BNP members as an integral strategy in their election campaign. This is artistic license on Lustgarten’s part and it serves to bring the play to a dramatic conclusion but it falsifies the reality, and this is a play which draws its strength from the real issues. I would have much preferred a less dramatic ending which saw Pete renounce the party because of abhorrence at their ideology and the values they stand for.
Posh may not be quite so electrifying but it certainly deals with pertinent issues. With Boris Johnson and David Cameron being infamous past members of the Bullingdon Club, we can see exactly where Wade is aiming her invective – straight at the heart of the Conservative Party. The first half of the play is a humorous romp promising much hedonism and revelry as the diners congregate at a private dining-room. A newly initiated member pointedly asks when membership of the club mean automatic entry into politics, but everything else remains lighthearted until things take a sinister turn after the interval. Leo Bill (of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland fame) plays Alistair, the most outspoken of the group - venomous in his attacks on the 'poor', he is a distasteful fascist with extreme views. The audience, who much of the time seemed to be laughing with these privileged bigots rather than at them, was perceptibly unnerved by the harrowing turn of events which sees drunken boisterousness quickly descend into serious violence. But soon they were laughing knowingly as the disgraced Alistair is offered a place in 'the party' by uncle-figure Jeremy.
For all its faults, A Day at the Racists has the edge over Posh, although both are exciting and thought-provoking works. Lustgarten's play worked so well because of the frisson generated by being staged at The Broadway. The same could be said for Posh, whose audience definitely had its representative Kensington & Chelsea contingent, but it didn't have the same urgency about it; one passionate member of the audience of A Day at the Racists stressed the importance of Lustgarten's play – the very people watching it have the power to prevent a BNP win in Barking & Dagenham and they have very little time in which to do it.
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