A powerful new play by David Edgar captures the struggle faced by migrants undergoing British citizenship tests.
TESTING THE ECHOTRAVERSE, EDINBURGH
GREAT EXPECTATIONSBYRE THEATRE, ST ANDREWS
OF MICE AND MENPERTH THEATRE
IF YOU were to see just one or two pieces of theatre this year, then it woul
dn't be bad idea to make sure that David Edgar's new play Testing The Echo – playing this week at the Traverse, in a new production from Max Stafford-Clark's Out Of Joint company – is one of them. It's not that it is the most elegantly written of dramas, although its quality is often several cuts above what can usually be expected from such a head-on treatment of a current political theme. And in terms of theatrical style, the show sometimes looks quite old-fashioned, asking its cast of only eight actors to play almost 30 characters, and sometimes sacrificing depth, and even clarity, in the process.
Yet, in the end, none of this matters. For Edgar's theme – the experience of migrants in preparing for, and undergoing, the battery of British citizenship tests – is so sharply relevant to most of the major political conflicts and dilemmas of our time, that Testing The Echo makes a riveting hour-and-three-quarters of theatre, staged with impressive skill.
In London, a class of half-a-dozen migrants is being taught English and citizenship by an impeccably liberal teacher, Emma Goodman-Lee; in Birmingham and Bradford, Tayana and Mahmood struggle towards the same test alone. And through all their stories, like a pulse, runs the litany of questions the students will have to answer about the nation they want to make their own; questions that most British-born people could not answer, but questions that help to define a functioning society, capable of giving its citizens certain key rights and protections.
Edgar has a tendency, here and there, to get too caught up in the navel-gazing dilemmas of his own 1968 generation of British radicals and liberals. But with the help of some superb projected images (designed by Thomas Gray), he also produces a brilliant study of the strengths and weaknesses of liberal western nationhood today, presented in a form that – in a classic Brechtian sense – forces us to think as well as feel, and makes this one of the most important and disturbing shows Edinburgh has seen in a while.
In theatrical style, Jo Clifford's superb and unsettling 1988 version of Dickens's Great Expectations is not unlike Testing The Echo, or – for that matter – David Edgar's own great Dickens show, Nicholas Nickleby. There's the same 1980s-style doubling and trebling of parts, the same panoramic view of a whole society, and the same strong, restless theatrical ingenuity. In Benjamin Twist's skilful and gripping new touring production for Prime Productions, Clifford's version is backed by a magnificent, haunting soundscape by David Fennessy, created live by the actors in performance.
And of course, for those interested in British identity, this story also contains one of the most piercing treatments in the whole of English literature of the way the idea of class operates in British society: dividing, distorting and excluding. Richard Conlon, as Pip, makes a superb job of capturing the acute sense of embarrassment and inadequacy created by Pip's humble upbringing, as well as the uncomfortable truth that his transformation into a gentleman is driven by his obsession with the beautiful Estella, wealthy, privileged, and cold as ice.
When it comes to the pain of migration, though, and the long, weary journeying in search of work that shaped the lives of so many Americans during the Great Depression, there's no greater writer than John Steinbeck, and no finer or more heartrending story than Of Mice And Men, his great 1930s tale of two men bound together by love, loyalty and shared dreams, trying to survive in a harsh agricultural economy that has no time for such bonds.
In Ian Grieve's good-looking and sensitive production at Perth Theatre, Jimmy Chisholm plays the hard-working casual labourer George, and award-winning actor Liam Brennan the big, slow-witted Lenny, for whom George has come to feel responsible. And if the production still slightly lacks pace and projection, the detail of the acting is so powerful that the final tragedy hits home like a hammer-blow, and is hard to watch without weeping.
&149 Testing The Echo until tomorrow; Great Expectations until tomorrow and on tour until 15 March; Of Mice And Men until 16 February
