Fairview - Young Vic

After the subtlety of A Kind of People and especially Unknown Rivers found this particularly disappointing as it didn’t give the space for sub-luminal racism which on reflection after seeing the other two plays is by definition the toughest form of racism to counter as it is below the surface and impacts all our daily interactions even if ‘unknowingly’

This play didn’t give me a cause for reflection in the way the other two plays did and found the second part and especially the ending undermined the intent, is it space or the right to exist equally in all spaces that is expected and for me it is the latter which is why I did not participate in the denouement.

Why? Because there no such thing as racist middle aged white men?

Ah gotcha. I highly doubt it. The show doesn't need it and it's sold out so I doubt they need to pull off any stunts at this late stage of the game.

I believe in New York it got a lot of these kind of reactions, it was only a matter of time before someone cracked here.

I saw 2 memorable moments from black audience members.

One was a young black guy who was scolding his white mate for participating in a certain point in the proceedings.

The other was an older black woman who proclaimed loudly when it was all over 'well I don't even know what the hell was just going on'...

Take from that what you will lol

I think I might react like the old black woman. What a queen.

Yeeesshhh. Its billed as a political play in a liberal theatre. Not sure what he expected

This play is about racism. Russians are not a race. What Stasia describes so powerfully in her post is xenophobia, which while based on the same ignorance and prejudice is a different thing. You can hide your nationality, you can't hide your skin colour. Women and people of colour will always cop the worst of it.

Pretty much everyone is discriminated against for some reason or another which is why most of us develop empathy for other people. It is that way from the moment we start mixing with people outside of our insular family group and often even within that family group. It comes from the fact that we are all incorrectly taught at a very early age that our self esteem and importance is based on what other people think of us and for people to like us we must be 'better' than someone else. This of course is the exact of opposite of what self esteem actually is. Self esteem comes from within us, not from outside of us.

We then go through the rest of our lives comparing ourselves to others and wanting to be better than them so we feel better about ourselves. But to be better than someone else we have to choose the people we think we are better than and they must become 'lesser' to us. The easiest way to do that is to pick those who we perceive or are taught are the opposite of us. Those that don't look like us, those we presume are weaker, those we can beat easily. They become our first targets and we lose all sense of empathy for our chosen victims. They deserve everything they get.

It is usually those with the least amount of self esteem who are the most racist/xenophobic and they usually get their strength from groups instead of remaining individuals because they need that group to feed their self esteem. It makes them feel powerful, it makes them feel superior. That power becomes their replacement for self esteem and they become addicted to it.

At the moment we have a whole generation that are fighting to become individuals everyone worships by turning into something they are not, while at the same time falling over themselves to fit into as many groups as possible to prove they are better than everyone else. A 'like' for something we do or say or share from a complete stranger has become more powerful than someone in real life 'liking' us for who we actually are.

What this is doing to the human psyche cannot be under estimated. We are currently in a situation where cluster B personality disorders have jumped from around 5% of the population to well over 30% in less than 10 years. Social media/media/political propaganda is literally throwing people onto the psychopathy scale on a delay basis and we are loving every minute of it. This should scare us, but it doesn't. We are all clambering to make that change, more people will like us that way. Buzzzzzzzz!!!

When you cease being empathetic towards others that part of your brain shuts down and it doesn't come back. Is a quick satisfying win over a complete stranger really worth that?

In the not too distant future gender, race, sexuality etc will no longer be an issue because literally more than half of the worlds population will blindly hate everyone simply because they exist.

Of course I can't judge the situation in UK from the inside but I think you're right in saying that UK has more "class" than "race"-related triggering situations.

Fwiw, and statistically speaking, in sunny south London everyone is a minority - I would probably say the issue is discrimination/opportunity rather than racism because the issues are broader than skin colour. Example:

Hmm. This one really tested my patience. The opening, bizarre parody of 80s/90s sitcoms was awkward, but had the potential to set up something really interesting. However, at the end of the day, the message seemed disappointingly superficial and delivered with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

As someone who’s mixed race and with parents with very different backgrounds (Asian and South American parents), the questions of identity, culture, stories, and who we are, and so on are particularly interesting and important topics to me. And yet this really didn’t feel like it had anything new or interesting to say.

And in terms of the approach, the various meta moments had the energy, but none of the exhilarating power of recent plays like When We Have Tortured Each Other Sufficiently, The Watsons, or the magnificent An Octoroon.

Two stars for me.