After hearing a discussion on Newsnight's Late Review (BBC2) about a black play at the Royal Court Theatre, curiosity led me to Fallout last Monday night. The audience was almost wholly white except for four or five blacks, including myself, interspersed here and there.
The play opens with a group of young black men charging on and off stage as though they were being chased by assailants. We were immediately told that they had beaten one of their contemporaries to death. He lived on the same council estate as they did and was about to embark on a university course.
I waited for a whodunnit, a thriller of some kind. I soon realised that there was no plot. The murderers, babbling inanities, revealed that the dead student had screwed the girl who ran the local cafe, and that her boyfriend and his posse had executed him.
These personalities - not characters - remained the same from beginning to end. Not one was transformed by events, nor did any transform the miserable train of events laid before us. The outline stood still and so did this band of actors. The playwright stuffed them with one-liners reminiscent of a stand-up comedian. This he passed off as dialogue, as the actors stood on their hind legs and preached from an imaginary pulpit. This was not a slice of real life, but of low life sketched by the playwright for the delectation of whites. The only actor over 21 was a drunk vagrant who drifted on and off stage saying: "Give us a pound." It was a barely disguised attempt to borrow one of Shakespeare's fools. But not a drop of wisdom fell from his lips.
The whites in the audience lapped it up, entertained by images of stupid, self-destructive blacks paddling through a cesspool of low-life behaviour. With no plot, characterisation or suspense, two police officers supposedly investigating the murder were reduced to preaching about the Macpherson report that followed the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
The playwright thought he was being clever when he set up one of the policemen as a black from the same ghetto who ranted in favour of brutal and murderous policing and referred disparagingly to young blacks as "niggers". I almost vomited.
The play ended in violence. The black policeman kicked and punched the suspect to within an inch of his life. Somewhere in the Royal Court, the liberal dynasty abjures all the rules that make for good drama when it comes to plays about blacks.
