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Richard Bean was born in the Northern English city of Hull in 1956. He is a psychologist by training and came to writing for the stage relatively late in life; his first playtext, a libretto, dates from 1995. In 2003 he wrote his first outright farce (Smack Family Robinson). Since then, he has had some two dozen of his plays performed. Some of these are adaptations, including the hugely successful One Man, Two Guvnors (2011), a version of Carlo Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni (1753). Bean modernised the setting, but more importantly he gave the man/servant plenty of room and time to ad-lib and to take a more and more aggressive stance towards an increasing number of audience members, culminating in physical on-stage humiliation. When the present author saw the play, some shocked spectators left at the interval, too soon to realise (at the curtain call) that the most ill-treated ‘victim’ was in fact an actor – her distress performed so palpably as to redraw the boundaries of comedy. At first glance, one could argue that Bean just avails himself of the commedia dell’arte tradition of improvisation Goldoni himself used, but Bean’s confrontational stance is original. He actually tries to scandalise the audience.

Scandals have become a rare commodity in British theatres this century. No matter how outrageous the subject matter and its treatment in a new play, audiences seem to take it all in their stride. In 1980, Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain led to calls for the reintroduction of censorship, and in 1994 Sarah Kane’s Blasted at least had the reviewers shellshocked and divided, but the wave of plays that followed soon had to accept the law of diminishing returns. In-yer-face theatre, in Aleks Sierz’ term (cf. Sierz), made transgression almost mandatory, but had to struggle more and more to recover any disturbing potential. At the same time, the numerous acts of sexual humiliation, cannibalism, torture, and defecation, accompanied by prolific verbal violence, were oddly unspecific. Kane’s play is set in a Leeds hotel room “so expensive it could be anywhere in the world” (Kane 3), and many of Mark Ravenhill’s or Anthony Neilson’s stage plays operate almost allegorically, too: They do not, as a rule, engage with concrete political situations the way docudrama and verbatim theatre did after the turn of the century, and they do not go in for subtle character studies. Situational humour is not their forte either.

It is against this background of conventionalised, Puritan offensiveness that Richard Bean’s achievement in alienating so many critics and other theatre-goers with England People Very Nice must be appreciated. The playwright Hussain Ismail for instance, reviewing the play in The Guardian, did not enjoy himself:

England People Very Nice is a dirty offensive against the French, the Irish, the Jews and the Muslims. It’s supposed be a satirical – or even, an ironic – potted history of immigration to London. But it didn't make me laugh or even learn; it just made me angry. (Ismail)

This statement, evidently made with real concern and hurt, nevertheless assembles a whole cluster of misconceptions of the role of theatre in the larger societal debate on immigration.

The original production of England People Very Nice had its press night on 4 February 2009. It marked a high point in Bean’s career; the Olivier theatre, the largest of the National Theatre’s stages, is probably the most prestigious performance space in the United Kingdom. To be allowed to attempt to fill that stage (to say nothing of the 1,150 capacity auditorium) is either a sign of an author’s renown or of confidence in him or her on the part of the theatre’s leadership. In Bean’s case, Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre at the time, directed the play himself. The stage was set for a major theatrical event, one of the state of the nation plays the National at regular intervals feels compelled to showcase. 22 actors and a spectacular display of stage machinery, old-fashioned wooden set constructions and sophisticated projecting equipment underscored the creative team’s determination to do things properly.

The play operates on several levels of fictionality, and its structure is actually more clearly evident in performance than on the page. It depicts a group of asylum seekers guarded by immigration officers while performing a play about immigration under the direction of two British theatre workers. The exchanges between and within those three groups constitute the framing play that make up the prologue at the very beginning of the play, the last few minutes (not called ‘epilogue’, though) of the third act right up to the interval, the prologue to the fourth act and its epilogue. Two frames, therefore, enclose the three acts of the first half and a single fourth one; this indicates the relative importance that Bean assigns to the characters and events of the second half of the play within the play, when its action arrives in our present. The embedded history play gets off to a brutal, speedy and sarcastic start:

(Enter Roman.)	First came the Roman with his rule
(Stabs man.)	And steeled the cockney with his tool
(Rapes woman.)	This seminal act improved the tribe
(Literate man/wife.)	And issued forth a learned scribe
(Men killed.)	The Saxons came, and came again
(Same woman raped.)	Were followed by the lusty Dane
(Men killed.)	They fought and fought eternal wars
(Woman raped again.)	The ladies loved the conquerors
(Bean, England People Very Nice, 15)1

1

A point effectively made: Romans, Saxons and Vikings all make up the “tribe”, but they do so by coming as murderers and rapists. Immigration proceeds accompanied by violence; Bean will show this repeatedly in the course of the play, although some later migrants will be offered violence rather than practice it.

The first act opens in the year 1685 or shortly afterwards, when the revocation of the edict of Nantes, taking away the religious liberties hitherto enjoyed by France’s Protestants, brought large numbers of Huguenots to London, where many of them settled in the areas of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green, just outside and to the east of the City of London. The play’s timeline is broadly linear, and the major political events are more or less historically correct, with occasional anachronisms that are not the author’s error but are addressed in the frame play. The function of these subtle irritations is mainly to highlight the intrinsic unreliability of a stage presentation; in any case, the reference to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (published 34 years later, 17), for instance, is as irrelevant to the plot as most later such lapses. There may be a link, however, to Defoe’s The True-Born Englishman, published in 1701, where he argues for the fluidity of English identity (cf. Voigts-Virchow 13).

This needs to be distinguished from anachronisms that do not depend on factual errors committed by the writers of the inset play. The play is full of them, and they typically combine linguistic features unusual or impossible at the time of speaking with a recognition trigger for an audience aware of the underlying debate. A striking example is the comment by Rennie, himself a very early migrant from Barbados, making clear that the Huguenots are not welcome: “There’ll be rivers of blood boy!” (18) Enoch Powell’s similar statement referred to above still can be counted on to be remembered by British audiences. Act two, set around the year 1780, sees the Irish arrive in Spitalfields; this time it is legislation providing for greater religious freedom for Catholics that ostensibly furnishes reasons for rioting. The Huguenots, meanwhile, are completely integrated: Gascoignes have become Gaskins; the large church in Brick Lane caters for their spiritual needs.

By this time Bean’s structural conceit has become evident: wave after wave of immigrants is absorbed into whatever passes for ‘English’ at the moment, only to replicate the prejudices and fears of the previous generation. When the Irish arrive, Rennie, one of the ‘eternal’ characters of the play, predicts that “[t]he rivers of London will run with blood boy!” (35), turning Powell’s chilling prediction into a running gag – spoken, we remember or see, by a black man. In act three, it is 1888, and Eastern European Jews, fleeing from religious and racial persecution, arrive in Spitalfields. We can extrapolate the plot: they will encounter hatred and love, they will thrive, and they will assimilate. In fact, by the end of the third act they buy the French church in order to turn it into a synagogue.

When act four opens, the setting is still the same pub as in the previous acts, but now it is 1941, and the new set of foreigners is here for different reasons: the Indian lascars, sailors recruited to man the British Merchant Navy in order to help with the war effort of the Empire’s mother country, are officially welcomed. Nevertheless, superficial toleration explodes into aggression and racial insults at the slightest provocation, and they are left to commemorate their many war casualties alone. The action fast-forwards to 1975 without an act change; the lascars’ once Indian home region of Sylhet, after a brief and bloody spell as part of East Pakistan, is now part of desperately poor Bangladesh, and many more Sylhetis make their way to Britain. They find it more difficult to integrate; young men turn to street crime, young women celebrate the New York attacks – we are now in our own century, and the synagogue has turned into a mosque.

The fourth act ends the play within the play in familiar fashion; while for the fourth time some of the immigrants realise that “Bethnal Green is the only paradise you’ll ever know” (passim), others plan a move to Redbridge, a more genteel London suburb slightly further to the north-east. The frame play concludes with a short scene in which the actors receive the long expected envelopes that either contain permissions to stay in Britain or extradition orders, which are executed immediately by immigration officers present throughout.

This summary has ignored most of the little subplots, love stories and even killings that make up the fabric of this sprawling play; while these differ from scene to scene, they are sufficiently parallel to complement the many exact verbal repetitions that add to the farcical character of Bean’s text.