A Fine Idea
Caroline Bacon
Directed by Charlotte Westenra
Arcola There, Studio 2
Star rating: 2.5
Ella Bryant, Georgina Rich, Grace Saif, Kevin Trainor. Photo credit: Beatrice Updegraff
International development aid and attitudes towards it is an interesting idea for a play. Just how much difference does the money make to individuals? Are aid workers deluding themselves? These are topics worth exploring.
The trouble is that there are many facts and statistics which need to be delivered with the result that this play is too didactic especially when it strays into Oh! What a Lovely War country by using satirical show-biz routines to drive the message home. There is sardonic wit in places, though.
The plot gives us Jo (Ella Bryant) fulfilling a lifelong ambition to follow her parents into the International Aid sector in memory of her grandfather who conceived the term “international development” and got it into President Truman’s inaugural speech in 1949. Cue for imagined conversations with him. Working in Kenya in the present, she learns that aid isn’t always what it seems to be. People with privileged backgrounds cannot conceive of the poverty levels – infant mortality, undernourishment and so on – which go on around them. And it’s a drop in the ocean anyway. Nobody quotes Jesus’s observation that “the poor will be with you always” but that’s the sense. And Kala (Grace Saif) whom Jo meets in Nairobi is an angry activist whose story does not end happily.
The cast of four all do good work with convincing multi-roling although some of the accent work is iffy. Saif gives an especially fine performance. She does grief and despair very memorably – a very different role from when I last saw her as Pauline Fossil in Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre.
Sadly this play knows what it’s trying to do but can’t make up its mind how to do it. And it’s bitty. One minute we’re in a realistic conversation and then, for example, we get a weird metaphorical surgical operation or a magician working tricks with numbers. The personification of institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a bit clunky too. It feels like something contrived by a teacher to convey tricky political points to Year 10.
Moreover at 90 minutes it’s too long. Florence Nightingale and the hospital at Scutari are in the mix, for instance and could go. I suppose it’s an attempt to draw comparisons but it’s an unnecessary digression which doesn’t add much.
In short A Fine Idea is worthy and worthwhile but not especially successful as drama. The title says it all really.
