Testing The Echo - Library Theatre - 11/03/08 by Jo Beggs

What is Britishness? The big question that fills the airwaves, pages of the newspapers – and now the stage in David Edgar’s new work with Out of Joint, Testing the Echo.

It’s great to see such current issues dealt with in the theatre, new writing that, as Edgar himself notes, “dramatises the dilemma”. Lines from the play, says one of the cast, “keep turning up in the newspapers” . Well worn words they might be, but in the mouths of these actors they remind us that these issues are not just about politics but about people’s very real, and often very fragile, lives.

With slick direction by Matthew Dunster, the company of eight tell a series of stories, charting the passage of British citizenship seekers from around the world. Clutching copies of Life in the UK and swotting for their tests they meet at an ESOL class, attempt to get to grips with British customs and practise multiple choice questions that would baffle many an English patriot.

In the middle of it all is red wine drinking, Guardian-reading Emma, English language tutor and giver and receiver of the contrasting points of view that the play poses. Edgar’s position on all the thorny issues raised isn’t clear – and he doesn’t want them to be. These are issues with no right and wrong – freedom, fairness, equality – and the play teases us with opposing sides, making all sound reasonable and settling nowhere. The debate on the stage prompts much debate in the theatre bar after the show – just what any self-respecting drama should do.

So what drives so many individuals to leave their homelands for an uncertain future in the UK? Solid research on the part of Edgar and the company reveals the overwhelming desire for freedom. But it’s a freedom we tend to forget we have until it’s taken away. Ironic then that increased immigration and the perceived threat it brings is the thing which does just that.

Each actor portrays several characters, spanning continents and races, inhabiting those characters with such dexterity that it takes a while to realise that you’re seeing the same actors in different roles. Narratives are broken up throughout the piece, yet seamlessly switch from one to the other. A sturdy, well laid mosaic of intimate stories.

Out of Joint took the show to Scotland, where, Edgar notes, the audience were “a bit bemused” by it. In Manchester it clearly strikes a chord. The nature of Britishness, from “cricket and warm beer” to Polish shops and shiny new mosques – is a hotly debated topic. If an Edinburgh audience feels detached from the issues raised, then Manchester is a city right at the centre of the dilemma.

Testing the Echo is a brave and satisfying new play, rich with ideas and pleasingly unsettling. Out of Joint deliver it with their usual confident and forceful style, marrying the personal and the global, delivering thorny issues without compromise. Edgar’s play will never become a classic – it will date in no time – and it’s all the better for it. Testing the Echo is truly a play for today.