A DAY AT THE RACISTS

The world premiere of a stunning new piece of political theatre
from award-winning playwright Anders Lustgarten

“Cos we made the Labour Party, do you know what I mean? Froze our bollocks off on picket lines, went on strike and lived off fresh air and f***k all for six months at a time. And now we’ve turned to dust in their eyes, ain't we? We’re the f***ing  problem now: chav scum, ASBO meat. A source of laughter. Prime time TV entertainment. I hate them for it. I bloody hate them for it.” 

A Day at the Racists is a devastatingly timely examination of the rise of the BNP in London.
Pete Case used to be somebody – a leading Labour Party organiser in the local car factories. Now he struggles to get by as a decorator as immigrant workers undercut his best mate’s firm, his son Mark can’t get a job or onto the housing list and nobody, from his Labour MP to his granddaughter’s teacher, seems to care.

Then Pete meets Gina. Gina is young, mixed race and standing for Parliament on a platform of helping the local community. She is standing for the British National Party. As Pete’s rage and despair gradually overcome his longstanding loathing of the BNP, he is drawn into the world of Gina’s campaign and finds himself entangled in a nightmare of political machinations that pit his closest relationships – son, best mate, lover – against his longest-held beliefs and newfound aims.

Set in the very Barking constituency that BNP leader Nick Griffin is to stand for in the forthcoming General Election, A Day at the Racists is a uniquely brave and perceptive piece of political theatre that both attempts to understand why people might be drawn to the BNP and diagnoses the deeper cause of that attraction – the political abandonment and betrayal of the working class by New Labour.

Anders Lustgarten is Pearson Playwright-in-Residence at the Finborough Theatre, where his first two plays – The Insurgents (2007), a comic drama about Kurdish immigration and political resistance to globalisation, and Enduring Freedom (2008), a powerful portrayal of the Bush years – were produced, while Torture Comedy, a satire on rendition and the War on Terror, was part of Vibrant! – A Festival of Finborough Playwrights in 2009. From 2007-8, Anders was on attachment at the Soho Theatre. He is taking his new play, You Cannot Escape Our Love, about Zimbabwe after Mugabe, to the Harare International Festival of Arts in April 2010. Anders is under commission to the Bolton Octagon. Other work includes The Punishment Stories, about black prisoners and Islam (shortlisted for the 2007 Verity Bargate Award), and an adaptation of Slawomir Mrozek’s The Police (BAC 2007). Anders works as a political activist; he has also taught on Death Row, been arrested by the Turkish secret police, and holds a PhD in Chinese politics from the University of California.