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Farce, as will be assumed in the following arguments, does not need to be funny. There is an empty, almost nihilistic quality to some of the best farces, and Bean occasionally touches that. Nevertheless, he mainly relies on stalwarts of physical comedy and verbal wit to generate comedy. The Irish bring a live pig, people are surprised while having illicit sex, there are disguises, and there is sometimes grotesque violence such as the killing of a one-eyed baby. In these moments, Bean sails close to the wind: after a barrage of anti-Irish incest jokes and one-liners about monocularity (“Oh, what a beautiful baby! She’s got her mother’s eye!”, 45) the murder is meant to be disturbing, not funny:

HUGO throws the child out of the window. The doll/baby lands on the stage. The audience should see it land and be shocked with the texture of its bounce. Enter SCHIMMEL and family. Jews from the Pale.

SCHIMMEL. Oy gevalt! Did you see that! And you think it’s tough being Jewish! (47)

Characteristically, the shocking image is followed by yet another joke using ethnic stereotypes, resulting in an invitation to laughter that operates on three discrete levels: the most basic one is the visual and linguistic stereotype of the Jew, who, as a representative of the third wave of immigrants, has been expected by the audience as the source of the third round of running gags. The next level is the joke itself: even in adversity, this Jewish speaker can assume an ironical distance to the plight of his people. Thirdly, there is an opportunity for laughter to shake off the impact of the killing. A glance at the theories of laughter shows three main mechanisms at work: superiority, incongruity, and relief. (There are more, but Henri Bergson’s theory of mechanisation, for instance, does not apply here; it fits very well, however, in a structural analysis of the play). The first of these three mechanisms describes hostile or condescending laughter, the second laughter of surprise, and the third laughter to release tension. What is noteworthy is that the result is the same whatever the cause was: individual audience members may well react to only one of the three stimuli with amusement while the others may not work or may even be resented. In such a constellation, somebody far removed from finding Jewish matters or characters the proper subject for derision might still laugh at that moment – out of sheer relief that there is no second sickening moment of death.

Thus, one may find oneself laughing in the wrong company, and worse, one may be mistaken for laughing for the wrong reason. I suspect that is at the bottom of the resentment the hostile reviews articulate: the theatre critics found themselves laughing in the wrong places, against their better judgement and whatever constraints politically acceptable speech acts had to obey in their view. Nicholas de Jongh reveals as much when he begins his review for the Evening Standard by stating that “I have never had a more uncomfortable or unpleasant experience at the National Theatre than at the premiere of Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice. I hated this gross, cartoon history”, while at the same time conceding: “Its invective is often funny, sometimes inventively so.” De Jongh concludes that the play fails to make an intellectual contribution to the ongoing debate about immigration. The counter position to this of course is that theatre is not primarily designed to make intellectual contributions but to present conflicts. If it exports these conflicts to a critic who experiences discomfort, unpleasantness and hatred while acknowledging inventive fun it seems to create a second-order dilemma that is now the critic’s problem.

Bean uses this technique in many variations, actively offering a choice of reactions and thus making the audience complicit in the invective. Here is a complex, polymedial example: the two female English characters run a rehearsal of the play (-within-the-play):

A bare stage.

GINNY. (Off.) Full company to the stage please!

The company of actors breeze on. Other asylum seekers enter accompanied by Immigration Centre Officers. They are in costume, depicting the early history of Britain – Angles, Vikings, Saxons, Celts, etc.

PHILIPPA. NOTES! It’s almost … quite good.

A mobile phone is heard. It’s YAYAH’s. He’s dressed as a Roman centurion with short sword, skirt, etc. He gives the short sword to a fellow asylum seeker and answers his phone.

YAYAH. (On phone.) Of course it’s me woman! … Listen! I am not in Lagos so you will have to beat the girl yourself! Goodbye, I am in a meeting! (9)

At the risk of labouring the obvious, let us compile a (probably incomplete) list of incongruities and stereotypes that serve two complementary mechanisms of generating comedy, the encounter of the unexpected and the confirmation of the fully expected. Here are some discrepancies of appearance and action that are potentially funny:

 There is visual dissonance between the uniformed or otherwise modern-clad guards and the ‘old’ characters.

 Yayah looks particularly odd in Roman uniform. (Please note that the suppositions are based on common pre-programmes, not on historical plausibility: there were plenty of African soldiers in the Roman army.)

 The modern mobile phone jars with the Roman uniform.

 It seemingly cannot be used as long as the sword is in the way.

 The fact that it is switched on demonstrates a lack of acting professionalism.

 Yayah answers it: another lapse of professional standards.

Taken together with the dislocating metatheatrical beginning of the performance, this is more than enough to take the audience by surprise. The counterweight to that is the sequence of associations Yayah’s speech gives rise to:

 No greeting formula from him: this seems to happen all the time.

 He addresses his wife (?) generically as “woman”.

 Beating ‘the girl’ – daughter, servant? – is an everyday task.

 It is usually performed by the male.

 Unusual circumstances encourage female agency.

 The girl, however, gets beaten either way.

 Yayah does not enter a discussion. He commands.

 He lies about the rehearsal, representing it as a more business-like ‘meeting’.

 He does not care if all this is heard (and does not care or does not suspect that inferences are made) by the others.

This list seems to indicate that visual signs are generally employed in the service of discrepancy: the asylum seekers are visibly out of place, and the performance breaks down when reality intrudes. You cannot wield a cell phone and a sword at the same time. Verbal signs, on the other hand, are used to recall a stereotype: Yayah comes across as impolite, arrogant, as#sertively male, violent and mendacious, assembling all the clichés associated with contemporary Lagos, Nigerian email scams and much older, but stable racial prejudices.

These are the very first moments of the play. They set the tone for much of what is to come, until towards the end of the fourth act the time of the frame play and that of the asylum seekers’ performance converge and the farce disappears – unless we are to see their random deportation as the truly farcical event of the evening. This reading may be too charitable – one observation in support of it might be that the simultaneous presence of characters clad in quasi-mediaeval costume and British enforcement officers at the beginning of the play recalls the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), the seminal film farce, whereas the last scene is un-anachronistic, with its action coldly pragmatic and (almost) free of jokes.

A consummate comedian like Richard Bean does not rely on one comic technique only. Before the many-layered configurations discussed just now lie straightforward comic routines like this one, set – in spite of the contemporary language – in 17^th-century Spitalfields:

IDA. Fucking frogs! My grandfather didn’t die in the English Civil War so’s half of France could come over here and live off the soup!

LAURIE. Your grandfather didn’t die in the English Civil War. He was in here yesterday.

IDA. That’s what I said. I said ‘my grandfather didn’t die in the English Civil War so’s half of France could come here and live off the soup. (17, emphasis in original)

The appeal of such an exchange – beyond its absurd reasoning – lies in its use of the fast-talking and even-faster-thinking Cockney stereotype that together with the alliterative kenning “fucking frogs” recalls two distinct strands of British popular comic entertainment, the music hall and television sitcoms. ‘Allo ‘Allo! has already been mentioned; Blackadder (1983–89) is another pretext that springs to mind. These formats generate much of their comic force by distributing targets evenly: foreigners are invariably held up to ridicule, the more so if they are (or attempt to be) immigrants, struggling to adapt, but they are not contrasted by virtuous, ideal Englishmen.

Bean’s modus operandi, particularly in this play, is that of excess. He doubles the layers of theatrical reality, quadruples the plot and multiplies both the techniques and targets of humour. The one constant is the subject of immigration, and much of the play’s coherence, such as it is, is due to the single-minded pursuit of it: displacement, voluntary emigration, flight, economic migration, assimilation, integration – hardly any dialogue lacks a reference to them:

TAHER. Why did you have to leave Azerbaydzhan?

ELMAR. My films, scripted by Aram Magomedli, ridiculed the government’s violent suppression of free speech. I felt safe, because there was never anyone in government intelligent enough to understand the metaphor. But last year, my script writer, my friend, Aram Magomedli –

TAHER. – they killed him?

ELMAR. No. He became Minister of Culture. (70)

Beyond such passages of traditional (political) comedy and the full employment of the mechanisms of farce Bean uses a technique that serves both as a source of comedy and a practical example of assimilation and semi-successful integration by plotting social change onto linguistic developments. Here is a speech by de Gascoigne, the most prominent of the Huguenots, made shortly after their arrival:

Like you, I am here in Brick Lane, in England this foul smelling swamp, only because I want to worship my God free from the constraints of Papal instruction, and the threat of death. Like lovers in exile, we must maintain French culture. The English are drunks, incapable of intellectual discourse, they make a god of common sense, they hate their children, and would always rather be ‘unting. We French, are superior in all things, watchmaking, textiles, armoury, and, of course, love.

There is uncontrolled sighing in the congregation.

Londoners fear our style, our sophistication, our romancing, They will not allow us through the gates into the city. So outside the walls, right here, let’s build French homes, in streets with French names, and through extraordinary and relentless love making, let us populate these streets with French children, and create a new Nîmes, a new Perpignan, a new Paris. (21)

We are to assume that this peroration is given in French, since a few pages (and a few years) later he addresses his hearers again in the following fashion:

Watcha! Turned out nice again! Cheer up love, it might never happen! Worse things happen at sea! Yes, I am speaking English! If you have difficulty understanding me I might ask you why. Some of you still have the fleurs de lis tattooed on your hearts. Your children, born here, cockaneeys, still speak French – why? France rejected you like a girl rejects a lover. A new page in history is writ today. England is at war with your sweetheart. I implore you not to give the English permission to question your loyalty! I am no longer Sidney de Gascoigne. From this day forth, I am brutal, short, pragmatic, Bert. Yes, Bert Gaskin, and my son Al-bert Gaskin. And I implore you all to similarly Anglicise your reputations.

Murmurs of disapproval.

I do this because she, France, broke my heart, but England, she offered me her bosoms! (29)

He clearly has become different, not only in the outward signs referred to by himself, i.e. the change of language and of name, but also in his half-hearted acceptance of a future that is British. This half-heartedness is mirrored in the not-quite-English quality of his accent (“cockaneeys”) and his professions of a disappointed love as well as the macaronic lexicon he employs, moving incongruously from London street slang (“watcha!” is a corruption of “what are you doing”) to fleurs-de-lis tattoos. He is not French any more, but not quite English yet: a perfect linguistic representation of the immigrant’s in-between state.

At the same time, the audience is made aware of the contrast between the flowery and sophisticated French heritage of “Bert Gaskin” and the hard and sometimes unpleasant living conditions in the East End. One of the points Bean makes repeatedly and well is that assimilation and integration may not be a tempting prospect even if the immigrants do not cling stubbornly to their previous cultural framework, simply because the receiving culture is unappealing:

ATTAR. […] Is your room to your liking?

MUSHI. Oh yes. Very nice. But you said I had to share the bed?

ATTAR. Don’t worry, he’s not English. (75)

and even more explicitly:

LAURIE. How’s a Muslim woman gonna integrate round here?

IDA. Get your arse tattooed, a crack habit and seven kids by seven dads! (94)