We’re in an audience, we are told; we are the population of a town, some of us are butchers, pin-setters or dogs, husbands and children, or so we are told. We have come together to collectively imagine the story, an absurdist whodunnit, led by our storyteller, who is also a postman, the postman who finds a body in a town we have been told to imagine.
Everything started to go wrong when the stranger arrived in this parable of small-minded hatred and prejudice, or at least that’s what we were told to imagine.
YESYESNONO’s ambitious new play invites us to scrutinise the fear at the core of xenophobia, the blaming of “the other” for the disappearance of a perceived social identity—and, we are told, we are that society, we create that identity.
Sam Ward’s gently persistent monologue is certainly prescient given the very real and very recent explosion of anti-immigration riots, which continue all over the country this week. Eloquently written to assist us in our imagining of a middle England every-town, the text’s attention to detail succeeds in evoking a vivid sense of place and people.
However, I feel that by offering the audience agency but giving it none and by telling us what to think without offering clear conclusions, sadly the whole thing falls a little short of achieving either intention—nothing is satisfactorily challenged nor resolved.