Fallout

Newsnight Review discussed Fallout at the Royal Court.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

TOM PAULIN:
What's so interesting about it is it's technically what you would call revisionist. In other words, it doesn't play the grievance line or the victim line. It's about black-on-black violence. It takes a community apart. It refuses to put any melody into the dialogue. When you read it and when you hear it, it's like chewing broken glass. It's at the bottom of the lift shaft stuff. It's very, very basic, flawed, wrecked, hopeless violent people, who can't get out of the community they are in, and who are not able and are not allowed to blame anyone outside it. So you have a sympathetic white policeman, a sympathetic white teacher who also plays the white policewoman in it. In other words, it confronts certain ideological ways of presenting black experience in this country. It also refuses to play to what was always attractive to me, which is the great music of the black vernacular. It reduces it to absolute chips.

KIRSTY WARK:
Paul Morley, I found it uncomfortable finding the boys having such humour among them. You know from the moment you enter the play that they have mashed a boy's head to bits, and yet the humour, I found it very hard because I am laughing with them when you know they have done something absolutely hideous.

PAUL MORLEY:
It's a very tricky thing to come to, this play. It gives a hint of a world that we are so confused about and we are trusting that Roy Williams is using the correct slang.

TOM PAULIN:
Oh yes, he is.

PAUL MORLEY:
How do you know, Tom?

TOM PAULIN:
I know.

PAUL MORLEY:
I didn't realise you were of that world! I think it was a great pilot for a fantastic TV series. The black cop and the white cop. I think it will make a fantastic TV series. It's interesting that these people are going to theatre now to do this kind of writing. For me, I wanted to see this develop and I wanted to see it go on to television. At first, I thought, "That's a terrible thing to say," because it's a kind of theatre, but actually it is a compliment because it is giving us something about the British culture that we are just not really getting anywhere. It was incredible to see it with a different kind of audience, a less middle- class audience, a black audience. They were laughing at things and you don't know whether to laugh with them - so it was more complicated than just being a pilot for a TV programme, but the fact it is such a great pilot for a TV programme shows it's a great piece of theatre.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
On the night I went, there were only four people in the audience, possibly because they don't live behind Harrods. I thought why aren't we showing this play in Bradford or Tottenham instead of Sloane Square. For me, there was no character development or emotional journey. By the end, I didn't know anything more about the people or the situation than I knew at the beginning. I did feel that a lot of the language was hiding behind noise and speed and movement, in order to disguise a certain vacuity of thought. I wasn't impressed by the language and I didn't feel there was any muscle in the form behind it.

PAUL MORLEY:
I worry that some of the experiences in there are cliché.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
We are nervous of criticising it because we don't live in that community.

TOM PAULIN:
I wanted a kind of aesthetic form. You could say it's television. You've got a sort of two-hour slab. But it's deliberately anti- aesthetic. When you read it, you see that - as when you hear it, the language is pitched against the idea of any kind of beauty. This is ugly, ugly, ugly basic language. You could not use the English language at a more basic level than this. That's what's terrifying about it. What he is saying, and he is saying this through the black police officer played by Lennie James brilliantly, in a complex way, is the frustration with being trapped in these attitudes and this language. That's what he's representing.