Marvel Comics Presents: Corbyn and Sidekick McDonnell

There is nothing fundamentally objectionable about a beret. It is a piece of headgear that prevents heat loss from the scalp. This is in the same way as there is nothing wrong with a single influenza virus. It is unlikely to do any harm by itself. What is scary, however, is when there are lots of them all packed into a small area such as a theatre bar, be that berets or influenza viruses. Then it is time to start worrying.

So begins my unified theory of dramatic criticism. Tune in next week for my views on continental breakfasts.

Approaching Empty is a dramatization of a book by Ishy Din, an ex-cab driver and unreformed playwright, about a taxi cab office and the two friends, Raf and Mansha, who run it. When Raf decides to sell the business to a competitor, Mansha (along with some friends) scrapes together the money to buy the place. However, when Raf presents the new owners with a different set of books that reveal the real state of the company, the men’s friendship is shown to be not as strong as it appeared. The writer’s intention was that while the plot of the play affects “Raf and Mansha…it could quite easily be Harry and Jack in a backstreet garage, or June and Margaret in a greasy spoon. It’s very much about working class communities and the themes could be applied to many different communities and peoples.”

Unfortunately Din is less than successful in this. Both Raf and Mansha are characters out of a children’s book; the slimy owner, Raf, who says “business” more often than Donald Trump and the cardigan-wearing Mansha who likes “things the way they are”. This is a fairy tale without any depth, and Raf and Mansha simply fall into tired old tropes of an evil boss and a faithful employee who is cheated by the system.

Nowhere is this more evident than the first fifteen minutes which begin with news of Margret Thatcher’s death. “Bitch” spits Mansha. I will give Din credit for something – he knew for whom he was writing. The whole crowd erupts into guffaws. Raf’s spirited defense of the necessity of her policies places him firmly in the ‘unsympathetic characters’ category.

At every point there are glimmers of a play that might have been. Din says that “the universality of the story is that it’s about friendship, it’s about families, it’s about community, it’s about betrayal.”

One of the most touching and painful things about watching the plot unfold is the horror of watching the metaphorical train hurtle towards the allegorical collapsed bridge. Raf and Mansha are not just best friends. They have lived and worked together for years and their families are connected by marriage. The claustrophobia of the small cab office in which the play is set is mirrored by the more ephemeral but no less present claustrophobia of the ever vigilant wider community.

However, Din spoils this effect by slicing the world into goodies and baddies. Why does Raf cheat Mansha? He does it because no one is using taxis anymore; he is trying to put his son through university and he can’t bear to be seen to have failed. These are all very human and understandable motives and yet they are obscured by a comic book villain style goatee, his shiny shoes and his constant repetition of “being in business means you have to be heartless”. At one point he seems almost ready to sacrifice his son for his greed.

There are other flaws in the play, too; the dialogue is spoken without pauses in between lines, making me, in the audience, feel as though I was being waterboarded with words.

I would prefer, however, to speak about the positives. Sameena (played by Rina Fatania) is a fantastic breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale production. She is a single mother recently out of jail on a mission to get her children back and to provide for them. She is convinced by Mansha to put the money that she receives from the sale of her parents’ house into buying the taxi firm and is ruined when the truth emerges. She is criminally underutilised and I find myself wondering if Din had expended all of his creativity on writing her and then, having run out of ideas, simply plugged his brain into the Momentum Twitter feed and put his pen on auto pilot.

The shadow of a play about the effects of deindustrialisation on the north of England is there in the script, but like the peeling and faded map that takes up the whole back wall of the set, it is a pathos-inducing imitation of the real thing.

-1 star