Theatre
Michael Portillo - Unwelcome horde
Published 11 April 2005
Theatre - Inane voices, ludicrous faces in a banal rant about immigration. By Michael Portillo
F*****g Asylum-Seekers
Cochrane Theatre, London WC1
Asylum-seekers can be blamed for almost anything. As the election approaches, Labour and the Con- servatives will try to outdo each other with tough talk. They promise to stem the flow of immigrants by making life in Britain unattractive for the newcomer. The contest between the parties provides an opportunity for artists, including playwrights, to turn an unflattering mirror on our society.
Victor Sobchak has chosen the satirical genre. Somewhat in the style of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" (for relieving poverty among the Irish by getting them to eat their babies), Sobchak serves up his piece deadpan. Stuart and Sarah are living their monotonous life when suddenly a horde of asylum-seekers invades their council flat. The intruders use violence to turn Stuart into their slave. They transform the home with their eastern fabrics, knick-knacks and cooking. They pray to a vengeful god. Their men refuse to work, are polygamous and put their wives on the streets.
Soon Sarah is having sex with one of the men because he is much better in bed than Stuart. All Stuart's protests to officialdom are met with indifference, as the local council is itself run by foreigners, and the police have succumbed to an extreme form of political correctness. By the play's end, the asylum-seekers have overwhelmed Britain's weakened national culture and look set to seize political power.
More skilfully handled, that approach might just have worked. As it is, the play is a disaster. The dialogue is almost wholly lacking in wit, the acting is universally awful, and direction (by Sobchak) is woefully absent. The only tolerable thing is the set, and sadly the programme does not indicate who should take credit for it.
That is as much of a review as F*****g Asylum-Seekers merits but, given that I have 550 words to go, I shall have to tell you in detail why it is such a shambles.
All of the acting is silly all of the time. Imagine 90 minutes of a single Monty Python sketch, but without any of its humour, and you get close to what this is like. For an hour and a half, the audience must endure inane voices, ludicrous facial expressions, histrionics and flailing arms. In a highly competitive field, Kira Daniels as the asylum-seeker matriarch may have been the worst by a short head, but Andy McQuade certainly deserves a mention for a quite dreadful performance as Stuart.
The absurd plot is devoid of any subtlety. There are so many good points to make about the immigration debate, so many tempting targets, but they were all missed in this ill-disciplined outpouring of banality. The play is never far off being a rant, and at critical moments it succumbs completely. Shaban Arifi as the asylum-seeker leader, Bobo, steps to the front of the stage to harangue the audience in the manner of a political speech.
At the end, in a scene that left me longing for the relative sophistication of the puerile sketches we submitted to the Footlights in my first term at Cambridge, Sarah turns into an impression of Lady Diana, the asylum-seekers' thug (played by Geir Kjelland) has a sex change and becomes a Margaret Thatcher lookalike, Bobo imitates Tony Blair and the mother becomes the Queen. Ho ho.
Is there anything to salvage from this wreck of a play? Well, Stuart and Sarah are indeed types who proliferate in our society. He is obsessed with television, football, beer and nights in. She dresses like a fat, pink tart and longs for clubs, champagne and celebrities. So far, so predictable, but Sobchak postulates that if Britain really is in danger of losing its cultural identity, maybe it is because it now has no culture.
Britain has endured past invasions (by the Romans, for example) and become strong after them. As the cycle moves on, our country weakens again, making it time for another invigorating invasion. With the influx of foreigners, our children will have a better education and be more intelligent. The asylum-seekers read Kierkegaard. (But why does the moronic Stuart go out of character and mention Jean-Paul Sartre? Is it another under-graduate-level joke? Maybe it's a tribute to that Monty Python sketch about a housewife meeting Jean-Paul "dans Ibiza".)
I quite liked it that the woman at the council office with a thick Catalan accent deplores and corrects Stuart's poor diction (he drops the "t" at the ends of words). It was nice that the pretty asylum-seeker girl fancies Stuart precisely because he is not masculine and therefore different from what she is used to. There were one or two good lines, but they were little compensation for an evening wasted.
In a programme note, Sobchak thanks the Soviet Union for education and experience, the British government for a new home, the KGB for everything and the Home Office for understanding. In this spirit of thanksgiving, I would like to record my gratitude that it was all over by 9pm.
Booking on 020 7269 1606 until 23 April
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
