Afghanistan is Not Funny – Arcola Theatre, London

Writer: Henry Naylor

Directors: Martha Lott and Darren Lee Cole

In the early 2000s, Henry Naylor was one of the up-and-coming stars of the satirical comedy scene. With his writing and performance partner Andy Parsons, their topical Radio 2 comedy show was one of the channel’s big successes.

But after the fall of the Twin Towers in September 2001, the BBC dialled back its comedic output. Naylor instead became interested in the disparity between the realities of the ensuing war in Afghanistan and a perceived squeamishness of BBC journalists, shying away from the realities of war in the name of the Corporation’s sense of “taste and decency”.

The result was a script for an Edinburgh Fringe play, Finding Bin Laden, due to be staged in 2003. But in a quest for his comedic work to be grounded in truth, Naylor and his friend, Glaswegian photographer Sam Maynard, went on a research trip to Afghanistan itself.

It is that journey that forms the focus of Afghanistan Is Not Funny. The piece is initially structured as some narrative stand-up, with laboured gags about the perceived melancholy intrinsic to the Birmingham accent, and a long-running (justified) beef with Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand, whose Andrew Sachs-related antics saw Radio 2 bin all comedies, including Parsons and Naylor’s. Alongside that, though, it is an explorer’s lecture, as we follow Naylor through his stories of an Englishman, a Scotsman and their Afghani fixer.

The devastation Naylor sees in and around Kabul – at that point, recently “liberated” from the Taliban (by, if you believed television journalist John Simpson, the BBC) – a city not so much battle-scarred as still bleeding. In a city still littered with unexploded ordinance, 82 children a week needed replacement limbs due to land mines strewn across the city and surrounding countryside.

As a comedian, Naylor naturally finds some levity among the chaos and tense atmosphere, but it is the growing sense of unease and humility that really captures. The writer’s growing awareness that he is putting multiple lives at risk for what he had intended to be a piece of Fringe silliness helps to underline the plight in which Afghani citizens were left as a result of the actions of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the West.

This new production, some 20 years after Finding Bin Laden, was inspired by the sights from Kabul airport in 2021 as the US withdrew, leaving those Afghanis who had been helping them to fend for themselves in a city where the Taliban had “never gone away, just melted into the crowd”. The result is a piece which is personal and political, intimate and epic.

It is also illustrated with some of Maynard’s photos from their 2003 trip, including one which Naylor says has haunted him ever since. The build-up to its reveal is more chilling than the photo itself, but it says everything about what Naylor wants to achieve with this work.

Finding Bin Laden ended by switching from broad comedy to an exposure of the real situation in Afghanistan. There’s a thematically similar attempt at a rug-pull in Afghanistan is Not Funny: while not quite as stark, it is more polished. In the 20 years since his first play, Naylor has grown up: our attitudes to the plight of Afghans now need to do the same.

Continues until 11 March 2023