Review: A FINE IDEA, Arcola Theatre

One of the most seductive ideas for a manager is the one that insists that managing a problem is good enough. Call it a workaround, call it cost-effective pragmatism, call it prioritising by not sweating the small stuff, but what you definitely can’t call it is a solution. The bum is still there waiting to be bitten.

Christine Bacon’s new play, A Fine Idea, starts by critiquing Development Aid in that manner, but reaches a rather different conclusion. Specifically that International Aid, as mediated by organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, may have started in President Harry S.Truman’s inaugural speech and the Marshall Plan with its noble intention rebuild a world shattered by war, but has morphed into a means of economic repression every bit as tyrannous as colonialism, its precursor. 

That’s where the play starts with our protagonist, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed Jo (Ella Bryant) hallucinating the presence of her grandfather, Ben Hardie (Kevin Trainor), who supplied the Big Idea - and its rhetoric - to Truman almost 80 years ago. Jo wants to make a difference to lives lived in poverty and she has already seen what aid can do and what its goals suggest for the future - she can continue the legacy. 

But she is already being educated in Kenyan Realpolitik at fundraising events where she shills for cash from the local, extremely protected, elite and is given a lesson in cynicism and kowtowing by her careerist line manager, Christine (Georgina Rich). That bleak prospectus is only underlined in a conversation about economics with an IMF official, presented as a game show, because, well, numbers are hard for theatregoers I suppose.

The play, though brisk at 90 minutes, does need a hit of energy at this point and gets it from Kala (Grace Saif), a local activist who speaks truth to power and exposes the charade of aid as a politically progressive policy, demonstrating its 21st century character. What was once a salve to the consciences of the ex-colonial rulers and the high-minded is now an instrument of coercion that maintains economies in thrall to global corporations ravenously hungry for cheap resources.

You will have noticed that there is little theatre in this review so far and that’s because there isn’t much theatre in the play. I suspect Bacon aspires to the didactic anger of Bertholt Brecht or Dario Fo - and, to be fair, the play is genuinely and righteously angry - but the didacticism overwhelms the drama. Jo just gets more and more disillusioned, Kala gets more and more drawn into radical direct action and the other characters are there as caricatures (a brusque Florence Nightingale) or to draw heavy-handed metaphors (a surgeon extracting every non-vital organ from Kala in another dream sequence). We are being taught about the issues through exposition.

In this, it shares a weakness with the wildly successful Prima Facie which also, in its third act, became passionately keen to educate its audience, albeit with much more of the stuff of drama in its first hour. The play as it stands needs more work on making us care for Jo, a more rounded Kala with a backstory rather than footnotes and other characters who do more than illustrate the next point in the manifesto. At least it does for anyone to whom none of this grim testimony to the systematic repression of the Global South is a revelation.

A Fine Idea is indeed a fine idea for a play, but this stuff is hard to pull off successfully. Adam McKay, with a blizzard of Hollywood tinsel to help him, couldn’t quite explain global economics in The Big Short and that had Margot Robbie in a bath telling us how we are getting screwed. 

That doesn’t mean that theatre shouldn’t keep trying but it should never forget that its audience has not paid for an illustrated lecture, but instead expects a play.   

A Fine Idea runs at the Arcola Theatre until 4 July

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