I had quite a few expectations going into Made Visible, but I wasn’t anticipating that it would be wry, and funny. The humour is the play’s saving grace as it retreads a conversation which in real life often threatens to disappear up its own handwringing white angst. In short, it is a dramatisation of a conversation writer Deborah Pearson had with a stranger on a park bench. A stranger who happened to be an older Asian woman in a sari. Beyond that, it’s a discussion about how white people don’t know how to talk about racism. There are endless reams of discourse about race. About interaction between races. About our involuntary racism. About the invisibility of whiteness. The crisis of how to say something meaningful about all that is the issue to which the play addresses itself.

Deborah Pearson’s incredibly self-aware play – a text in constant debate with itself, questioning the validity of its own existence – doesn’t exactly say anything new, but it does interrogate what we already know (whether we admit it or not) and it does manage, through showing or by stating all those things we tell ourselves about why we react to people the way we do, to trick its characters into being inadvertently honest. Pearson is known for her commitment to fringe theatre and has been nominated for a Total Theatre Innovation Award (and won many others) and she has been listed as one of the most influential people in UK theatre – so this is a woman with a voice, who knows she can be heard, and that context is very relevant when looking at who gets to speak and how much during Made Visible. (Spoiler: For once it isn’t the middle class white people.) Furthermore, she has written on the politics of narrative in theatre, so presenting her thoughts in this way is a very considered choice, calculated to be culturally effective.

An awareness of context makes the experience of Made Visible richer. Understanding the conversation Pearson is portraying allows us to laugh at the tropes, at the rhetorical knots people will tie themselves in to avoid saying the wrong thing, and the awful platitudes people come out with when confronted with a race or culture they’re not entirely familiar or comfortable with. The two Asian actors often seemingly stroll out of the fourth wall to interrogate the ‘Deborah’ character and the text – a device that belies Pearson’s own thought process in justifying putting this play on in the first place. It’s satisfying to see many of my objections to or quibbles with the main text acknowledged by the people within the Made Visible world and examined if not resolved.

One of the most interesting things the ‘Deborah’ character says as she tries to justify her play to the other actors onstage is that maybe the central event, the conversation with a stranger on a bench, was significant to that woman too because she didn’t often have an in-depth interaction with young white women. From this misplaced but not entirely unreasonable starting notion, she escalates out to the idea that ethnic minorities can ostracise and even dominate white people. That classic false equivalence is the very thing that derails every equality argument time and again, the idea that an exploited group kicking back at a dominant group is ‘the same thing’ as the systemic oppression they have faced for however many generations. It is a comforting argument for people who resent anyone trying to acquire what they have by virtue of birth, but also to people who feel guilty about having what others do not but don’t know how to rectify it. Recognising this and portraying it in a way we can laugh along with whilst still seeing the fallacy is the true success of Made Visible.

Actors of different races, cast to play race-specific roles, switching characters mid-show isn’t a groundbreaking device, but it was unexpected and effective. I felt more comfortable hearing an Asian woman recounting a story about being a white woman who is suspicious of some Middle Eastern men on a plane than I would have been hearing it from a woman I was reading as white, which was probably the point. The voices of white people always dominate conversations on race – their experiences and observations intrinsically deemed more valid than those of ethnic minorities. Pearson has clearly taken this on board and made the choice to give the voice to characters other than her own onstage proxy. They are still speaking her words though, that is the crux.

A few notes on the production: The lighting design is spare and stark and it’s effective. It’s married carefully with design to lead us into and out of ‘the play’ and the meta-world of self-reprobation and cross examination that frames it. The set is storybook tokenistic and quite charming, lending a whimsical air to the environment. The exposed wings, the brilliant white brick walls of the Yard (a nightmare to light but entirely appropriate for this piece), lurid coloured LED strips and the set of bold Perspex flats and parodic mocked-up park benches and pond create the ideal environment for a chronically meta-analytical piece of theatre about exposing hidden truths and self-examination. The space was perfectly suited to the content, so much so that it could almost be site-responsive. It will be interesting to see how Made Visible fares in other venues.

The subject matter is familiar and a solution isn’t really forthcoming (could it be?), but the execution is warmly self-critical and genuinely funny, enough so that the inherent egotism of making a play about how you feel about being white can still make for an entertaining hour.