A Fine Idea joins the dots on the failure of aid
Photo: Christine Bacon. copyright: ice&fire
Daniel Nelson
Theatre should make you think, but the Arcolais about to consider a particularly awkward and painful question: if you support international development aid, do you really want to change the world — or do you just like the idea of helping?
Efforts to improve the effectiveness of development aid have been made over the decades since US President Harry Truman set the aid ball rolling in 1949. Among the most trenchant and well-argued was Swazi-born academic Jason Hickel’s book, The Divide.
The book “tracks the evolution of [the [global economic] system from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world.”
Hickel argued that far from being a global success story, poverty eradication was failing because the real problem was political not economic: “Poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created.”
Playwright Christine Bacon remembers first hearing his views and how she reacted: “It rewired my brain in a way I didn’t see coming.”
The book “communicated things I hadn’t reallythought about or understood: my ignorance about how the global economic system works and the tension between aid and charity and justice. We let ourselves off the hook a bit. We say, ‘Oh, we give them aid, we do what we can.’ But we give with one hand and with the other we take away, crushing them with institutional power games.
“I hadn’t joined the dots. I hadn’t read deeply enough. I just hadn’t realised how wilfully blind I had been.”
Australia-born Bacon realised that, like her, many others would probably not have thoroughly thought through the failings, self-interest, biases, blindspots and misunderstandings underlying international aid. As a theatre-maker (she founded Actors for Human Rights after moving to the UK in 2004) her way of spreading the word would inevitably be via the stage.
It took years to transmute Hickel’s theories about politics and economics into theatrical drama, much of it set in Kenya in 2024, a time of deadly protests over the government’s economic policies. At the play’s heart is the relationship between an aid worker and a Kenyan activist.
It covers the rise of the global billion-dollar aid industry but it’s definitely not dull talking heads.
“Theatre is a live event,” Bacon emphasises. “A play needs excitement and dynamism, to be alive with theatrical imagery and playfulness. That’s the kind of theatre I want to see.”
This is her third play. The first were The Island Nation, about the bloody ending of the Sri Lankan civil war, and On the Record, about truth-seeking independent journalists.
“I’ve been a bit braver with this play,” she explains. ”I have thrown down the theatrical gauntlet. It's a heavy subject and it must be intelligible to people who would never read the book.”
Is it partly based on her own journey? “There’s something of me in it, for sure,” she admits, “particularly when I was younger and full of anger and fire, and a feeling that Something Must Be Done.
“It's a natural human instinct to want to alleviate suffering. The international development movement responded to that instinct. It certainly did the international bit but it’s clear it has not achieved the development bit. After 75 years of international aid and development, look where we are. We have to face up to and confront what is truly causing the suffering we feel so compelled to alleviate.”
A Fine Idea is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 AshwinStreet, E8 3DL until 4 July. Info: Arcola