The divisive Brexit factor: where does it fit into comedy and theatre?

POLITICS, so often the lifeblood of stand-up comedy and satirical revues, did not have much of a look-in at this summer’s Great Yorkshire Fringe in York. Brexit, apparently, is simply too divisive, and so comedians are focusing on the personal, turning inwards, rather than outwards, a potentially unhealthy dose of navelgazing when everyone else is discussing the political turbulence all around us.

Chris Booker, inset, blossoming York/Bridlington comic and host of Comedy @Angel On The Green’s open-mic nights, talks of avoiding politics, of not wanting to divide, of believing comedy is only funny if you play the underdog, shouting at things bigger than you.

Comedian Chris Booker: avoiding politics

His last sentiment will chime with theatremakers, and the ‘B’ buzzword – Brexit, not Bodyguard – makes its way into all three pieces covered in this sweeping reflection.

Luca Rutherford’s Political Party is a one-woman show, at once humorous but deadly serious too, just in time for the party conference season, wherein she ponders how politics can play a part in her life and what stops her playing a part in politics.

She does so by holding a party, a political party with party poppers, not party poopers, balloons, crisps, drinks from the fridge and dance music, eventually lost for words and out of breath in the labyrinth of philosophies. Cracking show, and not only when eggs are being smashed on her head. Don’t ask!

Rosamund Hine, James McLean, Daisy Ann Fletcher and Christopher Arkeston in Mikron Theatre Company's Get Well Soon. Picture: Peter Boyd Photography

On Sunday afternoon, Marsden’s Mikron Theatre Company followed up early summer’s suffragette play Revolting Women with an autumn return to York with Get Well Soon, a celebration of 70 years of the NHS, written by York playwright Ged Cooper.

Her debut Mikron commission was all we come to expect from this fine, principled Yorkshire company of actor-musicians, being both entertaining and educational, amusing yet concerned, fast paced but always with room to think, as Cooper pondered NHS past, present and even uncertain future.

Three generations of one family - an ailing grandfather (James McLean), his overworked hospital manager son (Christopher Arkeston) and a politically passionate teenager (Daisy Ann Fletcher,) - are the fulcrum for a story that takes in a Polish nurse (Rosamund Hine) facing the exit, NHS cuts and outsourcing, but also Nye Bevan’s bold vision and glorious medical achievements down the years. Here medicine can be a bitter pill to swallow, but laughter is the best medicine too.

Grace Christiansen and Martin Barrass in John Godber's Long Live The Kings Of Hull

Apologies for not seeing John Godber’s Long Live The Kings Of Hull until the dying embers of its Hull New Theatre run (a holiday got in the way). While this “cross between Men of The World and Bouncers” was ostensibly about the continuing wars, woes and worries of the King family, it was also Godber’s think-piece on Hull in the lull after 2017’s UK Capital of Cultutre art attack, contemplating the “legacy”.

He sees a city in part undergoing a gentrification/gintrification with gin bars in Humber Street and posh housing in Brough, but a city keen to hold on to its distinctive, maybe insular identity amid all the Brexit uncertainty.

Change might be necessary, but why change it to be the same as everywhere else, laments one character. If you don’t like Hull as it is, then lump it, suggests another. As for Godber, you sense he wants both worlds, the old informing the new.