It’s hard to make good political satire on the Left, though it is easy to make fun of us. There’s no lack of good material, or good satirists. But we’re a constantly moving target with an ever-evolving set of terms, concerns and ideas. And we’re also a bit of a sensitive bunch with a tendency toward self-importance.
This is the knife Deborah Frances-White gleefully twists in her satirical dramedy Never Have I Ever. In the program notes for this Australian premiere at the Fairfax Studio you’ll read the show described as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for the modern age”. But it’s more Edward Albee via the Netflix Original: an entertaining mix of bawdy wit and fine-tuned political takes with splashes of soap opera-style melodrama. Elevated by a high-energy cast and an evocative set, it promises plenty of light-hearted laughs in between clear-eyed insights into the paradoxes of being a modern progressive.
The Fairfax Studio has been transformed into Masada, a Turkish restaurant somewhere in London run by Jacq (Katie Robertson), a white bisexual woman who grew up poor and might be one-sixteenth Turkish. These facts are important to the play and the world of identity politics it wades so confidently into. It’s a familiar realm for Frances-White, the Brisbane-born expat whose The Guilty Feminist podcast built a huge following with its brand of wry self-awareness and nuanced encounters with Leftist hypocrisy since it started in 2015. That was ten years ago, when the language of identity politics looked like a shiny new weapon that might provoke real political change. In 2018 Frances-White published Guilty Feminist: From Our Noble Goals to Our Worst. It’s a great subtitle, and also the perfect summary of what has happened since.
This is where Never Have I Ever lives, in a world-weary Left that has seen the good intentions of identity politics co-opted and bastardised. Over nearly two-and-a-half hours we follow four uni friends – Tobin (Simon Gleeson), Kas (Sunny S Walia), Adaego (Chika Ikogwe ) and Jacq – as they make weapons out of their identities and shared histories. Class is in their armoury, as is race, sexuality, gender and ethnicity. Tobin is ‘one of the good’ white men; a hedge-fund manager and self-purported ally with enough money to fund his entitlement. Kas is the second-generation immigrant sensitive to conflict and Adaego the entrepreneur, podcaster and ‘identity politician’ ambitious to change the world for black women but also prone to self-importance.
It’s the oppression Olympics over wine and cocaine with this laundry list of well-meaning liberals. The Onion articles are quoted over dessert. Socialism and Brexit get a mention between memories of the student union and Britney Spears remixes (mixed beautifully by sound designer Sidney Millar).
All is fair in love and politics until a long-hidden secret is exposed over dinner. Suddenly everyone’s personal politics are tested. Cue the weaponry. Debates range from bi-erasure to disenfranchised white men, with Frances-White’s eye for nuance and fascination with conflict offering insightful critiques that ask how identity politics might provoke real material change in earnest. Ikogwe and Robertson are standouts, balancing levity and depth in every hard-hitting monologue and sparring match. Gleeson has a gleeful villainy to him, even if his character becomes static in act two. And Walia, though a bit slow to settle into things initially, manages to land the script’s most affecting moment: a monologue about the ways a dogmatic approach to identity politics dehumanises the very people it purports to serve. Meanwhile, they are surrounded by a large-scale restaurant warmly designed by Zoe Rouse and well-utilised by director Tasnim Hossain.
But no one is more critical of the Left than the Left itself, and I’m a Leftist critic. There is something about this script that felt like a 2015-era of Millennial politics, even as it questioned that very mode of politics in its characters. “Relatable content” Jacq says before Kas quotes Bridgerton. But it’s bigger than the occasional line here and there. The critique of Leftist politics this show offers gets thinner and thinner over its languorous runtime until we’re just watching people stage their own self-criticisms by drawing on its lexicon.
To my mind our biggest problem on the Left is individualism. Those wider issues that decentre us and our egos – like climate change, incarceration, capitalism or socialism – are given short shrift here in a way I think we should be critical of. So much of the latter half of the show hinges on Adaego and Jacq taking Tobin’s cheque for 800,000 pounds. The show implicitly subscribes to the belief that this money might resolve Jacq’s class-status or perhaps make it easier for Adaego to move through the world as a black woman. And that’s true, but only to some extent. It is an easy fix that subtly conflates individual gain with systemic change; personal ethics with political action. Frances-White is self-aware enough to know this, but the ending subscribes to it nonetheless, even softening it with general platitudes and simplistic calls for harmony.
I understand these platitudes. It’s a reasonable cop out for a show that puts itself between a rock and a hard place that we’re all caught between at the moment: cynical of the political viability of identity politics while also sure of the ways in which politics still coheres around specific identities. So give me your saccharine lines and your platitudes, Never Have I Ever! I might roll my eyes for a moment. But if the wind changes when I do, at least I’ll be stuck looking at this fucked up world in a new way.
Never Have I Ever is playing at Arts Centre Melbourne until March 22. Find out more and get tickets here.
