He made it his business to be the satirist of Weimar Germany and

He made it his business to be the satirist of Weimar Germany, and if satire doesn’t nark, then it isn’t working I agree, partly. George Grosz gets people’s goats You may say that’s as it should be. I may not have seen this production in its entirety, but I fully recommend it.In rep to 21 April (0171-928 7616). A predominantly English cast get right into the idiom of the brilliant, drug-driven dialogue, with its ritualistic formulas (endless repetition of fillers like “Blah-blah-blah” and “Rapateeta”) and the sheer musicality of its jargon-ridden paradoxical eloquence (“Your very ‘now’ is all, but not up to it” or “You are – I mean, a thousandfold – just utterly – and you fucking know it!”, a line timed to off-hand perfection by Stephen Dillane’s Artie). You’re like the location! They just use you to make the bullshit look legitimate.”What the play and Rupert Graves’s fine performance reveal is that Eddie’s cold, manipulative cockiness is a function of his searing self-disgust and – as is shown in the aftermath of Phil’s suicide – he has, accordingly, more potential for involvement and protectiveness than the tidier-minded Mickey.

Stung by Mickey’s charge that he only affects to like Phil because “no matter how far you manage to fall, Phil will be lower”, Eddie is pushed to destroying Phil’s highly precarious self-conviction, telling him that, to the TV people, “You’re like a tree, Phil. For reasons which Mickey regards as fraudulent and self-serving, Eddie has befriended a third-division TV actor and ex- prisoner, Phil, a vest-wearing and tattooed mass of repressed violence, emotional frustration and pathetic dependency in Andrew Serkis’s powerful performance. Like Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, which opened in New York in the same year, Hurlyburly dramatises the mutual mistrust and competitiveness underlying macho camaraderie and the psychological cost of armoured defensiveness.Eddie (Rupert Graves) and Mickey (Daniel Craig) are two divorced casting agents who share a home that seems to be a centre for a “wide variety of pharmaceutical experiments” (Eddie snorts and smokes breakfast), and for casual encounters with women, like Kelly MacDonald’s balloon dancer, who are used as sex tools. The play takes a savagely funny look at men floundering in an age when the old codes and guidelines are being discarded and the men themselves thrown out of their marital security. I bet, in the circumstances, that got a big laugh and a cheer.But there was a great deal to laugh and cheer about before this accident brought the excellent cast and much reduced audience into an enhanced Dunkirk-spirit intimacy. There’s a line in the last scene where a drifting, bubble-headed bimbo character returns, saying, “I’m just happy to get off the streets at the moment”.

We now have cause to kick ourselves.
True, people were never re-admitted to the theatre but, after 40 minutes, a proscenium arch show, set in a house in the Hollywood hills, was reassembled as an open-air, in-the-round staging using whatever resources were to hand in the square opposite the Old Vic. Assured that there was no possibility of its continuing, I made my way, along with a colleague and droves of other punters, to the Tube. Even now, the play’s progress persists in being picaresque, for as Wilson Milam’s production moved, after two-and-three-quarter hours, into the final scene, the theatre had to be cleared because of a bomb scare. Particularly so, he claims, on this side of the Atlantic, where it has wound up in limbo, loved and admired by directors and actors who have done everything with it but actually produce it.

In the programme to this English premiere production of Hurlyburly, Dominic Dromgoole notes that “few plays have had a more curious journey” to the stage than David Rabe’s 1984 masterpiece. Hence it follows that many ostensibly “white” Britons of today must, unwittingly, have black ancestors.Geneticists concur: we are all a lot more mixed than we realise, and so, maybe somewhere deep within us, there is a part of us that is drawn to other races, and to plays like Ayub Khan-Din’s.’East Is East’ opens tonight, Royal Court Theatre Downstairs at the Duke of York’s, St Martin’s Lane, London WC2 (0171-565 5000)Dr Raj Persaud is a consultant psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital. Yet we know from the lives of 19th- century figures of racially mixed parentage – like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the Croydon-born composer of the Hiawatha trilogy (and the son of a British mother and a West African father) – that many of these ex-slaves and their descendants married white British women. These black people seem to have largely disappeared up until the beginning of the 20th century. Given a total population at the time of nine million, there was thus a larger proportion of black people in Britain during the 18th century than at any period until the great wave of West Indian immigration began in the 1950s. We know that, in 1772, there were around 15,000 black slaves in Britain. But that there remains something indefinably special about a mixed-race ancestry is hinted at by the fact that Khan-Din himself is now in a long-term relationship with someone half Nigerian and half English, while – completely by fluke, it appears – all the young actors playing the children in East Is East also come from mixed-race families.But perhaps the play’s appeal works at an even more unconscious level.

Ayub Khan-Din vigorously rebuts this caricature: in his view, his parents managed to raise 10 highly successful and stable children.But while psychological research concurs that mixed-race children are on average no more likely to end up being delinquent or suffering from low self-esteem than their peers, Tizard and Phoenix’s study did find that 20 per cent wished they were white or another colour other than mixed, and while a further 20 per cent did not actually want to be another race, they were not proud of their skin colour.Certainly Ayub Khan-Din’s own success as an actor and playwright precludes anyone from defining mixed-race children as “marginal”. Interestingly, research suggests that, in the end, children are most likely to identify with the race of the parent with whom they get on best; hence, in his very efforts to inculcate Asian values, Khan-Din’s father may have been inadvertently guilty of actually driving his children away from Pakistani culture.Some of the other absurd paradoxes that make East Is East so hilarious also pop up in psychological research on the subject: thus psychologists Barbara Tizard and Ann Phoenix, interviewing mixed-race London schoolchildren, reported in 1993 that 38 per cent of them thought that at least one of their parents was racially prejudiced!More worryingly, as long ago as 1928, Harvard sociologist Robert Park invented the term “marginal man” to describe the children of mixed-race marriages – children destined for alienation from both black and white, torn between competing loyalties, the recipients of racism from both sides of the colour divide. Indeed it was the father who alienated his children so much that several eventually stopped speaking to him altogether. Both have to pick up the pieces of marital breakdown and, while psychiatrists might well wonder if marriage isn’t difficult enough even between the same races, without adding in the stress of inter-racial in-law disapproval and cultural alienation, social workers, faced with having to place mixed-race children in care, can worry that a single white parent might be less able to help their mixed-race children with the survival skills required in a racist society.Yet in Khan-Din’s play, as in his life, it is the Pakistani father – with his constant demands for respect from his children, often extorted through violent physical beatings – who probably interfered more with their normal childhood development than their supportive and long-suffering British mother. Still, despite all the traumas, Ayub himself remains sanguine about life in a mixed-race family.Psychiatrists and social workers might be less sure.