Theatre

Testing the Echo
Until May 3
This event has finished
Tricycle Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London, NW6 7JR
Rating:
By Jane Edwardes

Posted: Mon Apr 7
Some 40 years ago, before more leisurely examinations of the political scene such as ‘Pentecost’ and ‘That Summer’, David Edgar wrote revue-style satires. With ‘Testing the Echo’ for Out of Joint, he comes full circle with a look at the test that all would-be British citizens are now required to take. Edgar’s unusually short, educative play is given a fast-paced, zesty production by Matthew Dunster in which Teresa Banham’s Emma often appears in two scenes at once as she tries to prepare her students for their exam while at the same time arguing at a dinner party about how far British tolerance should go.

Many of the questions in the test would challenge those of us who were born British. Whose vision of Britain is it propagating anyhow? John Major’s belief in warm beer or a self-satisfied conviction that this is the most democratic country in the world? Or should the course simply provide useful information about how to survive in Britain today? Edgar points out that it celebrates a British commitment to freedom just as some of those freedoms are being eroded. Emma finds her own tolerance tested when a Muslim student objects to one of the teachers who is gay, to a work card she is given depicting a sausage, and to being asked to argue a point she finds abhorrent.

And yet for all the challenges it is clearly a momentous moment when the students are given their citizenship however drab the ceremony. Edgar’s plotting isn’t always totally clear and the harking back to 1968 seems irrelevant and yet it is oddly moving to think that across multicultural Brent there could well be people taking similar classes to the one portrayed on stage even as we watch the play.