Review: Exodus

From the opening video montage, Exodus wears its farcical pips on its sleeves. An ambitious Home Secretary and person of colour (remind you of anyone?) heads to Dover to dip her feet in the Channel as part of her anti-immigration posturing. An interview about a policy launch on the train north, well, it gets out of hand very quickly as all good farces should. And this is good farce: a tight four hander and there's not a weak link in this cast. Sophie Steer as SPAD Phoebe Bernays delivers a masterpiece of an onstage diazepam trip. And Habiba Saleh performing her play-within-a play part of Manjula Aunty gets a beautiful part written for her by Uma Nada-Raja, and makes hay out of it (though an earnest monologue is also the clumsiest, pace-killing piece of writing in the play). But it's as an ensemble piece that Exodus really leaps from text to stage.

But there's a problem: in the programme notes, Uma Nada-Rajah and Debbie Hannan write of the "proximity of tragedy to farce" and Darius Fo's idea of laughter which provokes anger rather than mollifying it. In the short years of this play's development, the gap between lived tragedy and the play's farcical world has continued to close, with more dinghies capsized in the channel, and a Rwandan outsourcing policy which is no less obscene than the "Project Womb" of Nada-Raja's sharp imagination. A line about a lame duck Prime Minister is played for wry laughs, but it's hard to shake the feeling that this farce is struggling to keep ahead of tragedy. In this context, the play's final peroration about immigration feels spot on, and horribly underpowered. In an inward, navel-gazing country gripped by the idea that it is under seige, what purpose does a scream against that within the four walls of a theatre acheive? Without a bold answer to this question, Exodus feels like fun, slick, siege mentality.