Playing with Fire

Synopsis

When the District Council of Wyverdale fails to satisfy a government audit, New Labour high-flyer Alex is sent north from London to formulate a robust recovery plan. But websites, faith festivals and council leaflets in Bengali seem beside the point to the Labour old guard, struggling to provide the basics to an alienated and divided electorate. What begins as a metro-versus-retro comedy of misunderstanding soon becomes a chilling drama about multicultural Britain. Populist politicians play the race card, racial tensions grow and good intentions have fatal consequences.

Our Review:

22 September 2005

It’s not every day that you see a contemporary new play with a cast of 23, nor yet one that costs the majority of the audience just £10 to see: the National Theatre’s annual Travelex £10 season continues to make good on its promise to make epic theatre that is financially accessible to all. And in concluding with David Edgar’s Playing with Fire, the season seeks to make theatre relevant to all as well.

In the slot occupied last year by David Hare’s Stuff Happens, Edgar’s play provides a localised corollary of the kind of religious tensions and racial factions that have led to the frightening destabilising forces behind 9/11 and our own 7/7, even though it's set before either event happened and was written in between the two.

Edgar's intentions are certainly admirable, but the result fatally lacks either theatrical drive or tension. While it briefly coheres at the beginning of the second act with a tribunal enquiry into the ba...

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Latest User Review

86.136.191.127) - 19 October 2005:

I'd like to suggest that Mikey's suggestion that people gave this bad reviews because they disagreed with its politics is ridiculous. People are giving it low ratings because, frankly, it's awful. This is the only production that I've seen, in about 16 years of theatregoing, where I felt unable to stay beyond the interval. The first act seemed to last about 8 hours. The auditorium was the emptiest I've ever seen the Olivier, that wondrous performing space. This production is ghastly, I pity the actors. And hate the writer for that hour and a half of my life I'll never get back!...

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