First Night reviews
The Times September 23, 2005
Playing with fire Benedict Nightingale at Olivier
When the riots that hit Oldham, Burnley and Leeds in 2001 prompted David Edgar to write Playing with Fire, his subject was topical enough. Now it's more up-to-the-moment than anything else in our theatre. Without intending to do much more than draw attention to a growing apartheid in our cities, Edgar has produced a play that helps to explain the events of 7/7.
It's a play of two halves, the first involving the near-collapse of a woefully run council called Wyverdale. Edgar once said that he loved meetings, which isn't an utterance that exactly promises dramatic electricity, but, despite the odd longueur, he holds our interest in the efforts of Emma Fielding's Alex Clifton, the cool, committed new Labour emissary trying to ensure that smug civic leaders stop doing things such as putting bathrooms into condemned houses and start doing things such as preventing white prostitutes picking up kerb crawlers in an Asian estate.
There's humour in Edgar's small-town epic, especially when characters such as Trevor Cooper's bewhiskered Old Labourite are wryly making chip-buttie remarks to an Inspector General who founded Stepney Women Against Racism; but it hardly reaches the heights of Gogol's great attack on local government. In any case, the serious point is that her efforts result in superficial Blairite reform, such as making St George's Day a celebration of ethnic diversity, but don't tackle a basic problem, which is that racial tensions are reaching boiling point.
They do so in the interval and, after some Tricycle-style docudrama in which characters give evidence into what have become the Wyverdale race riots, boil again in flashback.
What are the causes? Who is to blame? Could violence recur? Those are the questions that Edgar addresses in a second act that confused me at moments but was never less than intelligent, balanced and fair.
He thinks it too easy to blame either the far-right party exploiting the grief of a mother who has lost her son in an Asian attack or the young Muslim who sneers at the elder who prophetically talks of druggies and drifters who "come back to Islam, find their websites and talk of holy war". In Edgar's view, the trouble is more the divisions caused by often well-meant government and EU policies, such as funding poor Asian communities while neglecting slightly less poor whites.
So there's no political correctness here. Indeed, Edgar has fun at the expense of modish verbiage such as "antisocial public-space behaviour". Moreover, a 23-person cast that includes Oliver Ford Davies as an educated demagogue and David Troughton as the council's genially floundering leader is as committed as any cast could be. They left me stimulated and impressed. But excited? Not quite.