Читать книгу Finance, Terror, and Science on Stage - Группа авторов - Страница 22

Bean emphasises the importance religion has in giving the respective waves of immigrants a sense of coherence and belonging. The symbol for this recurrent need is the house of worship that begins as a Huguenot church, becomes a synagogue and finally the Sylheti mosque (only the Irish did not manage to turn it into a Catholic church in between). The building actually exists, a celebrated Brick Lane landmark whose history Bean depicts accurately. Its changes of dedication are peaceful: it is sold on to the next group as soon as their predecessors have become affluent enough to move out of Spitalfields. Religious description is omnipresent in the play, both as self-profession and as heterostereotyping, but its function is exactly that: a neat label that in itself is harmless. It does not compel believers to fight, nor are the immigrants attacked on religious grounds. This is not to say that there is no violence, but it is due to economic displacement processes, whether they are actually experienced or merely feared. The playwright makes these points implicitly, but at least once allows one of the characters to state it more openly, albeit with a typical twist:

HUGO. Stand and fight you fucking cabbage eating farting Frog Papist!

DANNY. Papist? They’re not Catholics!

HUGO. Frog lover now eh, Norfolk?

DANNY. They’re Huguenots, Protestants, they follow John Calvin.

BENNY. Not Godless then, like you.

DANNY. Let’s smash their looms, that’s reasonable. But I’m not kicking a Protestant in the head for being Papist. (22)

Religion only becomes a destructive force once the third generation of Muslims arrives on the scene. The Lascars and the Sylhetis, who actually immigrated to Britain, spend their lives trying to reconcile their origins with the ambiguous situation of every East End arrival:

MUSHI. My daughters gone hijabi, and they bully my wife into niqab! One minute I’m living with four beautiful Indian women, next minute I’ve got a house full of bloody Arabs! (105)

Basically, the play employs two complementary strategies of generating comedy, which are aligned to character and plot respectively: surprising one-liners and repetitive action, a blend of stand-up comedy and farce. Both elements, which were so strongly present in the first three acts, now recede and give way to an increasingly bleak representation of life in contemporary East End streets. If there is repetition at all, it becomes so monotonous as to defy even Bergson’s principle of mechanisation:

During the next a lone skinhead, [sic!] is knocked down, then hands over a street sign. Then he gets up, is knocked down again and hands over another street, knocked down again etc.

Warden, Nelson, Sugar Loaf, Wellington

Fournier, Rhoda, Old Nichol Street,

Brady, Buxton, Russia, Hoxton,

Hopetown, Hanbury, Jamaica Street

Brick Lane BoyZ Brick Lane BoyZ

Curtains hairstyles, cars like toys

Brick Lane BoyZ Brick Lane BoyZ

Get together and make some noise (99)

This is not funny, nor is it meant to be. The farce has become empty and joyless, its repetitive principle a chain of murders. The solitary skinhead streetfighter gets up again, the victims of the 9/11 attacks (101) do not, nor do those of the sequence of four explosions in London (107). In The God Botherers (2003) Bean had already targeted Islamic fundamentalism; here he continues his critique, and again he leaves us in no doubt about the link between condemnation of Western culture, radical Islam, and violence:

LABIBA. Sister, it ain’t never too late look

to quit your kuffar Facebook,

paradise waitin’

stop procrastinatin’

hate the disbelievers

they tryna deceive us

they will never believe us

Sheik Osama lead us

Shakespeare was a gay boy

knowhatisayboy

he get in the way boy

promoting fornication

to the Muslim nation

is not a situation

get my participation

it’s improperganda (111)

It is hard to say whether this collection of clichés is a representation of the rapper’s less than complex argument or rather Bean’s attempt to assemble buzzwords, but these, after all, do not amount to an argument either.