England People Very Nice starts as a thoroughly amusing romp through the history of immigration to East London from the 17th century onwards before losing its way badly to become a hackneyed lecture on schisms in modern-day Islam.

Let’s start with the good bits. Inspired by the lack of social or racial harmony in Bethnal Green, where writer Richard Bean lived for four years, the play kicks off with the cloth-trading Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France to be greeted by the violent resentment of Spitalfield’s local weavers.

The play uses an entertaining and satisfying chorus scene – an East End boozer where the barmaid and customers give their comment on the events of the age – which allows each resident population to trot out their tabloid soundbites about the incomers. “This island’s too small”, they cry, and “My Grandad didn’t die in the war so that a bunch of Frenchies could come over here”.

Fast forward 150 years, and the pub is populated by drinkers with anglicised French surnames outraged that the Irish, fleeing the potato famine, are stealing their jobs and their houses. A few decades later, the third-generation Irish incomers turn on the Jews escaping the pogroms in Eastern Europe.

After the interval, the vaguely endearing love story running throughout the play becomes tediously soap operatic, and there’s a turgid lecture on fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam’s colonisation of young British Muslim minds. Almost inevitably, we are then introduced to the stereotypical Asian rude boy who turns his back on drug dealing to zealously embrace religion.

The entire play is in fact presented as a play within a play – the conceit is that it’s being performed by the residents of an asylum centre – but the only purpose of this mechanism seems to be to apologise for and signpost confused continuity, lame jokes and rank stereotypes. Frankly, it would have been better if he had left this mechanism out.

The lack of laughs in the second half might have been forgiven if the seriousness had had a message, but the play ended with a whimper, and there was nothing to take away except that intercultural love (read sex/children) equals integration.

This is a shame, because – as I cycled home past the 250-year-old Huguenot church-turned synagogue-turned-mosque on Brick Lane, heard the tandoori waiters touting for customers, smelt the 24-hour bagel shops still working away and spied the Bethnal Green boozers where cockney geezers still prop up the bar – it seemed that there was a point well worth making about immigration. People come, enrich, integrate, snipe at the next wave, take part in the age-old ‘white flight’ tradition of moving to the suburbs and, importantly, the world keeps turning while all that goes on. Unfortunately, that got lost in what turned out to be a very confused play.

Ruth Keeling