Coming Up for Air
Oval House Theatre, London

Patrick Turner

A new form of political theatre reflecting the post-ideological temper of our times is coming into the ascendancy, according to the Guardian. Evidence for this can allegedly be found in the 'gritty' work of certain young Northern playwrights. They are less interested in excavating historic questions of ideology, political legitimacy and oppression, pace Churchill and Edgar, than in authentically rendering the subaltern social milieus and idioms of multicultural Britain.

Don Kinch claims to have got his inspiration for Coming up for Air from an encounter with a West Indian man who informed him that, following an 'angry exchange with his sister', he had been detained under section 22 of the Mental Health Act. After being physically and verbally abused and drugged, the man had been diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Mental illness is relatively rare in the West Indies according to Kinch, whilst 'as many as one in four Afro-Caribbeans in Britain will be diagnosed as having some form of mental health problem'. He felt it was legitimate to ask, therefore, whether or not there exists 'a cultural bias in diagnosing mental illness' in this country.

The Guardian thesis that there has been a shift from a theatre that asks the so called 'big questions' to one that focuses on the micro concerns of marginalised demographics. But in Kinch's work, wider questions of oppression and ideology are in fact refracted through the lens of cultural particularity.

The action in Coming Up for Air takes place in a remand cell, with Denzil (Carl Coleman) - a black, Jamaican man about to be sentenced (pending psychiatric reports) for the murder of 'three 'community leaders' - and Jules (Chloe Okora), a Nigerian psychiatrist whose job it is to assess Denzil's sanity for the court.

The play is fundamentally concerned with power as expressed in class, ethnicity, gender, and language. Kinch's intricate weaving together of these various strands is ambitious and well served both by his feel for dialogue and the performances of the actors, particularly Carl Coleman. Social injustice, however, is read off post-colonial notions of diasporic identity, difference and hybridity. These issues are entertainingly aired, but Kinch, ultimately, provides little by way of piercing analysis. In fact the action, significantly, concludes on a note of nihilistic impasse.

This should not, nevertheless, detract from the play's interest, or indeed importance. For one of the things Kinch manages to do is unintentionally give form to the antinomic nature of post-colonial readings of social injustice.

The 'uncultured', or even 'primitive', existential murderer, railing against his theorisation by those who have no understanding of his world, is opposed to the 'cultured' black woman who has allegedly experienced a simultaneous loss and gain by her elevated status. Coming Up for Air provides an equivocal spectacle of 'performative' and 'essentialising' accounts of cultural identity that in the final analysis probably says more about our current preoccupation with giving 'difference' its due recognition than it does about social injustice.

Run over.

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