Uma Nada-Rajah’s misjudged National Theatre of Scotland satire on British refugee policy starts out promisingly enough, largely thanks to a terrifically entertaining turn from Sophie Steer as Phoebe, a borderline psychopathic government spad, operating in territory not a million miles away from Peter Capaldi’s iconic Malcolm Tucker.
As the play begins she’s brusquely extricating herself from a one-night stand with Haben (Habiba Saleh) an affable young woman with a foreign accent who she picked up in a club. Haben overhears Phoebe barking furiously at a subordinate down the phone: something has gone amiss with an actor they had hired for an urgent project. Haben ventures that she’s an actor. One thing leads to another and she’s signed up to pose as the doting mother of Asiya Rao (Aryana Ramkhalawon), a distinctly Priti Patel-esque Home Secretary who is doing a profile interview with the Times on the train from Dover to London. A disguised Haben is supposed to swing by and offer a little human warmth to the profile. But uh-oh – it turns out that Haben is in fact an illegal immigrant, escaping persecution for her sexuality in her home country. She is not a fan of the hardline minister.
Okay, this exact sequence of events would clearly never happen, but a bit of daftness is okay. Where Debbie Hannan’s production lost me for good was when it became apparent that it was absolutely committed to tackling the whole thing via the medium of absurdist farce. While Asiya is posing for a photoshoot in the waters of Dover, a baby washes up next to her; it freaks her out and she’s terrified the photographer will see it, so she stuffs it in her handbag, triggering a deeply bizarre sequence of events as she’s torn between a desire to mother the baby, monetise the baby, and chuck the baby out of the train window. Then there is a whole thing about Operation Womb, a plan to surround the UK with a big barrier of deadly energy that will simply stop anything at all arriving on its shores.
Fine, but the surging loopiness of the situation – and increasing detachment from any sort of grounding in reality – simply kills any sense of satire. What does all this mucking about with a baby say about the cruelty of our current government? No clue! There is maybe something muddled coming through about the suppression of maternal instincts in female politicians, but it’s so nonsensically garbled as to be almost incomprehensible.
You can of course argue it’s just supposed to be a laugh and it’s missing the point to complain that it’s ineffective satire. But it’s fundamentally clear that there are points where it’s trying to be deadly earnest, not least the hysterically unearned ending wherein footage of the successful protests against Home Office deportations in Glasgow is solemnly played. It’s a bit like doing a big loud fart then playing the ‘I have a dream’ speech and congratulating yourself on making something deep. The extreme silliness of ‘Exodus’ simply lets its targets totally off the hook.
