InkBlog

Trafalgar Studios, London
When positive discrimination appears to rob a boy of his college place, the racial pieties of America’s left are exposed in Joshua Harmon’s drama

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Joshua Harmon has a gift for provocation. The last play of his we saw, Bad Jews, took a swipe at dogmatic certainties. Now he takes aim at the smug pieties of bien-pensant white liberals. His play gains topical edge at a time when wealthy Americans are accused of buying places for their kids at elite universities, and is likely to make many people look guiltily at their consciences.

Harmon’s setting is a progressive New Hampshire school where Sherri, head of admissions, boasts of having increased the proportion of students of colour to 18%. The crisis comes when her son, Charlie, finds that his place at Yale has been deferred while his best friend, Perry, has been accepted. It so happens that Perry, with a white mum and biracial dad, is classified as black and this leads Charlie into a hysterical rant against all forms of positive discrimination. His parents are suitably appalled but are even more horrified when a penitent Charlie decides to expose the advantages enjoyed by his privileged caste.

The beauty of the play is that Harmon lays bare the hypocrisies of the liberal left through satirical comedy. Sherri frets over the need to give the school’s prospectus the right racial balance and, accused of favouring students of colour, pathetically bleats “some of my best friends are white”. But the play’s real target is a system that gives a head start to those who go to prestigious universities: we are reminded that Ivy League graduates (for which you can read Oxbridge) make up a tiny percentage of the population but dominate key professions.

One of Harmon’s sharpest blows shows the desperate attempts of Charlie’s parents to bend the system to ensure their son keeps his place at the top table. It’s a pungent, pointed, political play even if Daniel Aukin’s production is occasionally excessive. Ben Edelman, imported from the US cast, overplays Charlie’s initial diatribe and is much better when he calms down. But there is first-rate work from Alex Kingston as his anguished mum, Sarah Hadland as her distressed best friend, Andrew Woodall as her blustering husband and Margot Leicester as a survivor from an era that believes personal qualities matter more than mathematical quotas. Covering race, class and educational bias, this is a play guaranteed to make white liberals shift uneasily in their seats.

• At Trafalgar Studios, London, until 25 May. Then touring until 1 June.

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