4 September: The People Next Door

 

I confess.  I picked up this play thinking it was something else!!  Oops.  I hope you will forgive me.

 

It is a modern play.  Very.  Be prepared for a few naughty words!  It deals with modern problems, with humour.

 

This is the 2003 Theatre Guide summary of the play (well, bits of it!)

 

I think we all deserve a treat. It's been a long, hot summer, everyone has been off at the Edinburgh Festival, and the only histrionic fiction staged for our delectation has been the Hutton Enquiry. Happily, we can now all have that special treat, because Henry Adams's Fringe First Award-Winning play has transferred from the Traverse to the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

This is a very fine piece of writing from the Caithness-born playwright, Henry Adams.  .... It's strengths lie in its wit, its characterisation and its bizarre and topical plot. It is also belly-laughter funny. It is so satisfying to reel with laughter at some of those things we fear most.

The People Next Door deals in topicalities and stands out particularly in Scottish playwriting simply by putting a hitherto neglected minority group of black and Asian immigrants on the stage. Ipso facto it's got everything going for it.

Nigel is a half Pakistani whose father did a runner when his Scottish mother was pregnant. In his daydreams he is Salim, an ultra hip, super cool guy with considerable street-cred and the lingo to prove it. In everyday reality, he lives in a tenement on disability allowance having been diagnosed with a mental disorder. He might have a borderline personality but Nigel is warm, caring, savvy and just crazy enough to have no inhibitions about saying what he thinks. In other words he is utterly loveable.

His only friends are Mrs Mac, the old Scottish widow upstairs, and a black teenager, about as smart as they come, with an unfortunate family background. Nigel suffers from chronic anxiety, and if he thinks he is paranoid a man is just about to walk into his life to show him he's not nearly paranoid enough.

Enter Phil, a bent copper with stashes of drugs in every pocket and up his nose, and a psychosis Freud would have salivated to get onto his couch. Phil bursts into Nigel's life because he has discovered that the long-lost half-brother, the golden boy, Karim, has become an international terrorist on the wanted list of every intelligence agency in the Western Hemisphere and Phil intends to show the boys in the Special Branch that the average copper, himself in particular, is just as smart as they are.

This is genuinely a topical play, with a serious political statement to make, if, like I do, you see the personal as political. But it is delivered to us with a comedy that bleeds seamlessly on occasion into farce and satire.