My Name is Rachel Corrie at the Young Vic

A version of this review was first published on Exeunt.

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Rachel Corrie is lying on the floor, gazing up at the ceiling, her legs propped up against a set of tall wooden slats drenched crimson red. She’s playing some music on a portable CD player. The Big Dipper has been drilled into the top right hand corner of her makeshift wooden wall, but over the course of the play it begins to looks less like a celestial constellation and more like a bullet-riddled aberration. Right now, at the opening of the play, she’s in her bedroom in her hometown of Olympia, Washington, in the rugged northwest of the United States. She puts on a helmet. Her head, encased in it, thunks again the stage floor. It’s a sharp, unsettling sound, almost as if it were her skull against tarmac. But she rolls over, surveys the small studio audience in The Clare, and grins.

So begins a play that cuts to the bone of the Israel-Palestine conflict through the eyes of a white, American, college-educated young woman. A young woman who documented her life with great warmth and candour, and who embraced the world the same way – and a young woman who was very quickly canonized by the public as a fallen heroine.

My name is Corrie, and while I wasn’t named for Rachel Corrie, I remember – as a sixteen-year-old in 2003 – searching the internet for my name and its associations in the earlier years of search engines. The shrill static of a dial-up modem makes several appearances in the production, as it did frequently in my early forays into the internet. Rachel’s name was always the first to pop up, and the headlines that came with it. How strange, I always used to think, that a spotty Singaporean teenager might share a name with an American activist who decided to go to the Gaza Strip to protest Israeli occupation, one whose death I (as a young person in Asia) tended to associate with the actions of the Tiananmen Square Tank Man. Both tiny figures on a blurry television screen standing up against the military and its metal. Both brave to some, foolish to others.

My Name is Rachel Corrie was first staged in 2005, two years after Rachel’s death. This revival 12 years later – and 14 years after the contested bulldozer incident that killed her – feels just as poignant, but also deliberately and deeply problematic. Outside the Young Vic on press night, picketers waved Israeli flags and gave out well-designed pamphlets mimicking the production’s marketing materials. Rachel, they say, ‘was a vulnerable young lady who was exploited. A young idealist manipulated by terrorist enablers’.

But this production, intimately directed by Josh Roche (winner of the JMK Award 2017) and featuring a stunning, heartrending performance by Erin Doherty, doesn’t shy away from Rachel’s flawed idealism. They take a reflexive view of the text, which begins with Rachel’s political awakening in college and how she leapfrogs from cause to cause, trying to make some sort of meaning out of her comfortable life. The staging edges away from a portrait of Rachel as some sort of white saviour, instead sketching her out as a sheltered, privileged young woman who, through the cumulative experiences of her progressive upbringing, discovers her capacity for radical empathy and cannot turn away.

Doherty’s Rachel is sunny, confiding, and immensely likeable. Doherty is astonishingly precise in her ability to capture the wide-eyed enthusiasm of an undergraduate who realises she inhabits a safe corner of a hurting world. Her Rachel has the book smarts of a student who’s consumed all sorts of texts on political economy and moral philosophy, but never had to live through a war. The language she uses just prior to her trip to Palestine sounds like she’s parroting the over-careful lexicon of the political correctness textbook. But this rapidly evolves when she arrives and makes a life on the ground in the ‘nonexistent place’.

There’s no doubt Rachel cared deeply for the Palestinians who opened their homes and hearts to her. But so much of this epistolary play, stitched together from her journal entries and emails to family, still comes across as a white woman translating life in a non-white conflict zone into digestible morsels of information for a western audience. Rachel wrestles with the fact that she can choose to leave at any time; the Palestinian figures who are anchored to their homeland and must live through day-to-day violence are little more than cameo appearances in the recreation of her internal life. This, I must add, is more a problem of the play than the person. It is Rachel’s story to tell, and she acknowledges that she can’t help the life she was born into. But I’m also glad for other productions, such as Palestinian actor Ahmed Tobasi’s powerful coming-of-age story And Here I Am, that give insight into the polarising conflict from a Palestinian point of view.

I sat gripped throughout most of the production nonetheless. Rachel’s lengthy polemics towards the end of the play are leavened with tremendous humour and heart. Some of her reasoning is contradictory, and her single-minded passion often blinds her to the fears of her parents terrified over the safety of their daughter. She’s as idealistic as she is disillusioned; she’s both incredibly mature and utterly naive.

Even as the production attempts to sidestep an entirely romantic view of Rachel, there’s plenty of sentimentalising as the play comes to a close. But as I step out of the theatre, I wonder if I might ever possess the same reckless courage to pursue and support a cause I believe in. I also wonder what it is that makes us more keen to memorialise those who die young, and who die unexpectedly. These two trains of thought dovetail as my ‘what-could-be’ blends into Rachel’s ‘what-could-have-been’. At this point, I realise that most of the picketers have given up and faded into the night. Only two remain, and this time they don’t stop me as I walk down the street.

• My Name is Rachel Corrie is on until 26 October 2017 at the Young Vic. Click here for more details. 

A Lie of the Mind at Southwark Playhouse

A version of this review was first published on Exeunt.

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Sam Shepard’s unsettling American family dramas from the late 1970s and the 1980s have been crawling across the London stage of late, with their festering wounds and shedding limbs. Last winter’s Buried Child was a portrait of a crumbling family drawn through its land, with its failed Illinois farm and mysterious corn and, of course, the child of the title itself. A Lie of the Mind is also a family portrait, but this time of two unravelling families in the desolation of snowy Montana, where Shepard picks apart the archetype of the rugged American northwest and turns it into a jagged psychological landscape.

The play opens in the wake of a terrible act of domestic violence, an unspeakable and brutal act committed by Jake (Gethin Anthony) on his wife Beth (Alexandra Dowling) that has left her in hospital with severe brain damage and him on the run. Jake’s brother Frankie (Michael Fox) is his first confidante, who eventually decides to travel to Beth’s home to see if she has lived or died, while Jake grows increasingly unhinged, both physically and emotionally. Jake’s mother, Lorraine (Kate Fahy), insists that he must be kept at home to recover, and has no recollection of Beth, or him ever marrying Beth. Neither do Beth’s parents of Jake. Baylor and Meg (John Stahl and Nancy Crane, both astonishingly good) seem to have wiped the wedding from their memory, despite their son and Beth’s brother, Mike (Robert Lonsdale), insisting that they were there (or, at least, one of them).

More than thirty years later, Shepard’s 1985 text still glitters with despair and devastation. It’s an intricate, textured work that brings together themes both familiar and familial – a cocktail of masculinity and emasculation, parents and children trading places, sibling jealousies, simmering resentment, the end of the American Dream and the post-industrial economic slump of the 1970s – echoes from his previous family dramas. You could say the same of the America of today, with its disenfranchised white working class. But A Lie of the Mind ratchets up the action when it comes to isolation, denial and selective amnesia, particularly when it comes to the things its characters are desperate to convince themselves of: the belief that a man can rely on himself and has no need of ‘females’ (while remaining completely reliant on the women of the family); the belief that the American flag is still a symbol of hope and aspiration; the belief that what is broken can forcibly be made whole.

In Shepard’s America, everything is ever so slightly off-kilter, which has the effect of suffusing the entire play with incredible unease. Memory and forgetfulness pervade the play. Characters forget key milestones in their lives, including weddings, illnesses and deaths. In a Pinteresque turn, they invert daytime and nighttime, groping through a sort of unending twilight. It’s a talky play full of emotional inarticulacy, of the things that families have forgotten how to communicate. Beth must learn how to speak again, putting half-remembered words and sentences together in a pidgin English that, ironically, makes her the most articulate character despite her lack of language and her lack of memory – because while the other characters navigate social niceties and follow conversational circles of politeness and fear, she speaks simply and directly. Her damaged acuity for language may have imprisoned her in her mind, but the words she speaks have a startling clarity. “Look how big a man is,” she exclaims, examining the oversized shirt she is swaddled in, “So big, it scares him. He puts his shirt on so he won’t scare.” Here is an America so isolated, so infantilised – the way Jake and Beth regress to their childhoods while trapped in the care of their families at home – that it has forgotten how to grow up, children and parents alike.

This production directed by James Hillier, however, feels like an America on steroids, a flannel-wearing, gun-slinging, stag-head-mounting America – all the things which do, indeed, happen in America – but so exaggerated it feels like America in high definition and with a high frame rate. The ensemble’s accent work is, quite literally, all over the American map, from the deep South to upstate New York, which made any reference to Montana incredibly jarring, especially because it is Shepard’s specificity of place that heightens the blackly comic and deeply surreal touches to his otherwise naturalistic drama. Very little in the split-level set or the production’s costumes feels lived-in, the sort of broken-in-ness in clothes and shoes that one would get in rough, snowy terrain, and many of the cast members handle their rifles with the carelessness of those who have never handled guns (including handing it to others upside down, with barrels pointed in all sorts of fatal directions).

Despite this bleached facsimile of America, Hillier has a strong grasp of the both the humour and bleakness of the dialogue itself, never mind the interpretation of the country or its accents. It’s in the plotting of this dramatic tension that the direction and the ensemble shine, and even at a daunting 140 minutes (165-ish if you count the interval), they keep up the pace, the pathos and the comic timing. I loved the absorbing, precise exchanges between Stahl and Crane that channel both the affection and resentment that percolates in a long, difficult marriage, one between a brusque patriarch and his long-suffering, mediating wife. The rest of the cast isn’t as surefooted, with some managing to be utterly compelling in one scene and completely baffling in the next. Beth, in particular, doesn’t sound like her recovering brain is struggling to produce or process any of the words she is shaping with her mind or her mouth, instead relying on an affected, shallow whimsy. But, as an ensemble, there’s a determination to pad out these lower points and the lack of a cultural context with camaraderie and sheer will.

And, in a way, this strangely exoticised portrayal of working-class white America is fascinating in terms of what it overlooks and what it emphasises. The theatrical America is, ultimately, a study of what filters across the Atlantic and how the mythos of 20th-century America is both dismantled and perpetuated. There’s a wonderful image that captures this contradiction, where a dishevelled Jake stumbles into the spotlight in a wifebeater, boxers, an aviator shearling jacket, and the Stars and Stripes draped Superman-style around his shoulders. He’s both a child and a man, a disabused abuser, an inadvertent symbol of America. He’s both the truth and the lie he tells himself.

Gethin Anthony as Jake. Image: Lidia Crisafulli

PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Writer: Sam Shepard
Director: James Hillier
Cast includes: Gethin Anthony, Nancy Crane, Alexandra Dowling, Kate Fahy, Michael Fox, Robert Lonsdale, Laura Rogers, John Stahl
Set Designer: Rebecca Brower
Composer/Musician: James Marples
Costume Designer: Natalie Pryce
Lighting Designer: Jai Morjaria
Sound Designer: Max Pappenheim
Movement Director: Jesse Fox
Run dates: 4 - 27 May, 2017
Tickets: http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/show/a-lie-of-the-mind/

Nina Raine's Consent at the National Theatre

I'd reviewed Nina Raine's Tribes in Singapore when Pangdemonium staged it; it glimmered with the warmth of empathy, where a family reconnects with their son and brother after years of indifference to his disability. Her new play Consent has none of that. It's brutal. Empathy is just another weapon in a war of attrition. Consent is about rape and sexual consent and the indifference of the law, but it's also a portrait of the wounds that marriage leaves when yes and no get muddled. This review of Consent was first published by Exeunt Magazine.

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I like to think you never really learn how to fight with someone until you’ve been married to them. I speak from experience. These are the fights you can only have when you know exactly which layer of scar tissue to dig a switchblade into so that it will bleed out slowly and painfully, and that will take you days – no, weeks – to stanch the wound with forgiveness and apologies. Maybe it’s the legality of the marriage contract that does it, the signing of which is at once a surrender and a liberation. And both legality and marriage take the floor in Nina Raine’s exquisitely devastating new play, Consent.

Consent circles closely around rape, and sexual consent is the play’s main artery. Three middle-aged couples, mostly close friends and mostly in the legal profession, are navigating the affairs of the heart over copious amounts of alcohol in their cozy living rooms – as well as a court case at work. Two of the male barristers are on opposing sides of a rape trial: the by-the-book, conscientious Tim (Pip Carter) as prosecutor for the crown, and the cerebral, self-righteous Ed (Ben Chaplin) defending the alleged rapist. Ed and his wife, Kitty (Anna Maxwell Martin) have just had a baby, and are good friends with another high-powered barrister couple, Jake (Adam James) and Rachel (Priyanga Burford), whose marriage holds more than just a few secrets. Then there’s Kitty’s alluring best friend, the actress Zara (Daisy Haggard), who bemoans the lack of female roles written the way the Ancient Greeks’ were – fiery, fiendish goddesses storming across the stage.

Zara gets her wish. Raine brings her scalpel to the dissection of the human heart when it comes to love, marriage, relationships, fidelity and revenge, flaying every part of it with clinical precision. While examining why the violent, repulsive act of rape still evokes such polarising responses in society, be it victim-blaming, slut-shaming or “she said no, but she meant yes”, Raine maps the justifications and excuses that come with consent onto the unruly territory of marriage. Women aren’t only treated as physical possessions in the courtroom, where a rape survivor, Gayle (Heather Craney) realises she’s been stonewalled by the system, reduced to just another statistic. One weeping husband shouts at his wife: “He’s stolen you, the fucking thief” – and it’s clear she’s become a possession in marriage as well.

There’s a symmetry to Consent. The yes-no of it, the husband-wife, the thinking-feeling, the black-white, the right-wrong, the sorry-not sorry. The brutal arguments that run through the play, pitting one side against another, are then themselves inverted, where couples seem to fall into a mirror and come out the other side to find themselves horribly disoriented instead of reflected the way they think they will be. Director Roger Michell doesn’t just position his couples as contenders in a ring; he shifts the ring itself, flipping entrances and exits and positions of power, where every physical side taken on stage also means an alignment with one person or one belief against another. On Hildegard Bechtler’s clever, automated set, the detritus of crumbling marriages disappears and reappears, sliding soundlessly back onto the surface. The fights are long, draining and melodramatic, and their irrationality and relentlessness feels deliberate. Fights are never rational. They’re bloody and frustratingly repetitive, and make every victory feel like a pyrrhic one.

But Raine leavens her lacerating dialogue with generous lashings of humour. Consent may be exhausting, but it’s also darkly, overwhelmingly funny, even at its bleakest points. Her words find the perfect conduit through a stunning cast of seven who inhabit spiky characters hard to sum up with a collection of adjectives. But it is the on-stage coupling of Maxwell Martin as Kitty and Chaplin as Ed who are the most luminous of them all. She’s the proud empath to his detached logician. You feel entire conversations pass between them in the glances they exchange behind backs.

So much is stuffed into Consent. It’s also a tirade against the dispassionate gaze of the law and never lets you forget it; the barristers may well be wearing signs declaring ‘us lawyers are assholes’. But this also means that some of the stuffing shows at the seams. Raine wants us to mull over how rape culture is embedded in what is spoken and done and dismissed behind the closed doors of domestic life, but while Craney as rape survivor Gayle is absolutely gutting, her character sometimes feels like a convenient narrative device to bind this team of elite barristers to the muck of the real world. And while Consent wanders the infinite grey area between ‘yes’ and ‘no’, the symmetry that Raine and Michell revel in throughout the play, through wordplay and imagery, can feel just a tiny bit too on the nose.

But Fate adores its symmetry, its beginnings and endings. There’s a touch of the Greek with all of this: the hubris, the vengeance, the downfalls, the redemptions. What do we mean in a marriage when we say yes, and compromise, when we really want to say no, this is a dealbreaker? What do we mean when we say no to the person we both love and hate, when we are dying to say yes, I want you back, I want to work this out? It’s not just the big yes-no questions that get an airing, but the tiny ones as well: will you fold the laundry, will you have another glass of wine, will you tell me the truth about this text message? I’m not giving anything away by saying that Consent, in a way, ends as it begins, with a small gesture of an invitation. Say yes.

PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Writer: Nina Raine
Director: Roger Michell
Cast includes: Adam James, Anna Maxwell Martin, Ben Chaplin, Priyanga Burford, Pip Carter, Heather Craney and Daisy Haggard
Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting Designer: Rick Fisher
Music: Kate Whitley
Sound Designer: John Leonard
Running dates: 28 March - 17 May, 2017

Snow in Midsummer at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

(Disclaimer: this is one of my stream-of-consciousness reviews, stuffed with rambly excitement and tangents.)

I recently made the trek up to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Snow in Midsummer, the 13th-century Chinese classic by Guan Hanqing also known as The Injustice to Dou E, in a radical new adaptation by playwright Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig and directed by Justin Audibert. Audience members filtering into the velvety Swan Theatre may have been enchanted by a large tapestry in the style of a Chinese ink painting draped over the stage, or the trill of birds, lutes and flutes. Scottish actress Katie Leung, girlish and coy, is trying to sell her weavings to those sitting in the front row. But this is all clever misdirection that relies on certain expectations of “the Oriental play”. Leung scampers off stage and – bam! – the chintzy tapestry falls, neon lights set the stage ablaze, a DJ on the overhang above the stage is dropping some heavy beats, and we’ve been transported to what looks like the heart of present-day Hong Kong.

It’s a gritty urban space called New Harmony, where the well-heeled industrialist Tian Yun (Wendy Kweh) is set to purchase a large factory from the young tycoon Handsome (Colin Ryan), who’s excited to finally embark on a round-the-world vacation with his boyfriend Rocket (Andrew Leung). But what would Snow in Midsummer be without a festering family secret and a delightfully vengeful spirit? Katie Leung’s Dou Yi claws her way out of the grave to haunt Tianyun’s seven-year-old daughter, Fei-Fei (Zoe Lim), and a dark curse begins to spread across the ailing town.

Seeing this slick, sexy production at the Swan Theatre had me imagining what it would be like if the posh Beijing People’s Art Theatre did a contemporary adaptation of Cao Yu’s hyper-incestuous plot-twisty Thunderstorm (1934) in Kardashian reality TV style. (They would never, but a girl can dream.) Audibert’s flamboyant, confident take on Snow in Midsummer blends the tropes of popular Hong Kong television serials – the kind that knows exactly how to whet and sate the appetites of millions of viewers – with high classical drama. The Yuan Dynasty play pre-dates Shakespeare by about 200 years, but through a Western lens there’s inevitably a touch of the Shakespearean about it, and Snow in Midsummer is a veritable feast of big, meaty dramatic arcs. The emphatic, flickering neon signs on stage are emblazoned with the themes of the play, including 正义 (zheng yi; justice), 冤枉 (yuan wang; usually translated as being falsely or wrongly accused of something, but loaded with a particularly potent sense of bitterness), and 无辜 (wu gu; innocence) – obvious to a Chinese-speaking audience but a nice touch of subliminal messaging to those who don’t understand the language.

This production is showy and grand, utterly horrifying but also very funny – a vivid, violent death in one scene may immediately be followed by a bawdy, debauched one (my favourite scene might have been the three People’s Army soldiers exchanging advice on flirty text messaging), a nod to the fact that Shakespeare isn't the only one blending epic deaths, buffoons and the use of comic relief. Sure, the second half drags its feet with the technical exposition required to set up a series of “oh no they didn't!” plot twists. But, oh, these outrageous, juicy plot twists, they had my Hong Kong drama serial loving heart. And they would probably have your heart too, if you gasped when Darth Vader declared to Luke Skywalker: “No, I am your father!”

And then there are the homages to Asia’s particular genre specialty – the genuinely terrifying horror film. Did I spy the long-haired Sadako from The Ring (1998) in one of Dou Yi’s appearances? The ghost’s relentless desire for revenge immediately brings up Ju-On (2000), the grudge that keeps on giving – and there are strong echoes of the Pang Brothers’ The Eye (2002), in which a cornea transplant goes horribly wrong. Of note to those who have already seen the play – in Singapore, the Human Organ Transplant Act was only passed in 1987, and huge debate across members of all religions surrounded its amendments in 2004; the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore issued a fatwa in 2007 so that Muslims could also come under the Act. Even as a secular nation where there’s a strong separation of religion and state, the connection between organ donation and the afterlife was something that we, as a country, wrestled with well into the late 20th and early 21st century.

Which leads me to one of my favourite things about this contemporary update of Guan’s play: its matter-of-fact inclusion of the supernatural as part of a daily lived experience. “Chinese scholars” don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural still exist in the East – the same way Western/English scholars don’t need to tell you that strong beliefs in the supernatural do still exist in the West. Whether you have deep convictions and roots in Christianity or Taoism, one thing is for certain – both religions and cultures are tied to a strong belief in the spiritual and supernatural. And these everyday beliefs are everyday fixtures in Snow in Midsummer, woven into the play and normalised beautifully and generously. In several scenes, there’s a meticulous altar to the Goddess of Mercy and, later on, an instantly recognizable funeral altar laden with food and gifts to the deceased. None of these cultural traditions are “a curiosity” – in the play, a routine visit to a temple is part of the fabric of everyday living the way one might go for weekly mass or a bible study. Superstition and science not only rub up against each other – they coexist.

Snow in Midsummer is a good exemplar of how a complicated Chinese classic can become a pacy contemporary adaptation – one that’s reverent in its treatment of Asian work and translation, but also deliciously irreverent when it comes to playing with tropes and conventions, whether it’s melodrama or horror. This production marks the beginning of the RSC’s Chinese Translations Project, and – permit me this Asian stereotype – it looks like a downright auspicious one.

Stray thoughts, including mild spoilers:

• I’m pretty sure there are people in Hong Kong whose names are indeed Handsome and Rocket. (Names I’ve come across: Virus, Bubbles, Drizzle, Apple, you get the idea.)

• This could have been completely arbitrary, but I loved how the various UK accents mapped relatively well onto their Chinese counterparts. Katie Leung has a Scottish lilt, and her character Dou Yi is also from the north. Wendy Kweh is from Singapore, and I definitely mapped my archetype of the affluent, practical Singaporean businesswoman onto Tianyun. Like I said, it was probably unintentional, but so much fun to imagine.

• I totally called the death by rat poison. I KNEW IT.

My Country; A Work in Progress at the National Theatre

I recently reviewed My Country; A Work in Progress at the National Theatre, which reminded me distinctly of Wild Rice's Cooling Off Day (2011), a piece of testimonial/verbatim theatre documenting the political resonances and the public's response to the watershed 2011 parliamentary elections in Singapore. I wrote about it in great detail here.

The following review of My Country was first published in Exeunt Magazine.

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On June 24, 2016, as the results of the EU referendum began pouring in, my colleagues and I were watching our computer screens in a newsroom in Singapore with morbid fascination and sickening dread. The percentages sank – 51%, 50%, 49% – as did our stomachs. Our more utilitarian fellow citizens made a point of swarming currency exchange outlets in the central business district to change their strong Singapore dollars for the plummeting pound sterling; money changers shuttered and refused to sell any of their reserves.

The fallout that filtered through to our side of the world, a former British colony no less, left us baffled. Had the majority of UK residents understood what they were voting for? Did David Cameron just up and quit, humming a merry tune at his final press conference? Who was going to steer the UK out of this mess? And yet much of it also sounded familiar, overlapping with socio-political sentiments felt halfway around the world: the anti-immigration rhetoric, the promise of jobs and healthcare, the affluent island nation wary of its neighbours.

My Country; A Work in Progress is the National Theatre’s first attempt at dealing bluntly with the reverberations of Brexit and the country’s spectrum of responses to the referendum, and there’s a brevity to it that reflects, possibly, the haste with which this piece seems to have been put together. It’s an ambitious title – My Country – one that attempts to speak for all of the UK through its vox populi, and perhaps it isn’t surprising that the 75-minute result is a selection of highlights rather than a textured interrogation of the whole.

The hardworking cast of seven, suited and suitcased, embody and personify seven regions in the UK, playing up the accents, the archetypes, and the cultural quirks: Caledonia (Stuart McQuarrie), the North East (Laura Elphinstone), Northern Ireland (Cavan Clarke), Cymru (Christian Patterson), the East Midlands (Seema Bowri), the South West (Adam Ewan), and Westminster, the seat of power, Britannia herself (Penny Layden; she’s affectionately referred to by the other regions as Britney). Britannia has convened her various regions to observe the vote and to speak on behalf of their people against a backdrop of desks and ballot boxes. But by divvying up the country according to its geography and relying on the stereotypes that go with them, this theatrical United Kingdom predictably remains a Divided one.

A team of ten from the National Theatre gathered interviews with residents from across the country, aged 9 to 97, which were then knitted together by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and director Rufus Norris. Excerpts of these interviews are presented, by the personifications of these seven regions, as collections of pithy quotes: “If you’re going to export bombs, you’re going to import people,” declares a resident of Wales; Boris Johnson’s “the EU would be a lobster” speech gets a gleeful impersonation. The interviews have been judiciously edited to reflect a range of responses, with both Leave and Remain camps rubbing up against each other. The conversation moves through a selection of topics: childhood memory, nostalgia for a pastoral history, class privilege, welfare and benefits, geographical boundaries, those who are suspicious of immigrants and others who are more compassionate – the piece is at its best with these intimate verbatim interviews, with Duffy and Norris sustaining their blend of playfulness and pathos. The digestible soundbites are crowd-pleasing, accompanied with laughter and recognition, but they also make it hard to see My Country as more than a compilation of quotable quotes, the sentiments of which have already been paraded endlessly through the news.

My Country wants desperately to speak for the universal and the personal at the same time – the play’s subtitle, A Work in Progress, acknowledges the impossible goal it has set for itself. Halfway through the show, each of the seven regions wheels out a buffet of local foods. It’s an easy gimmick: a Talisker single malt from the Scots; Geordie pizza from the North East. It strikes me that My Country is an amuse bouche of a political documentary, one that summarises the UK’s complex diversity without getting its hands too dirty in the trenches that drive it apart.

My Country; A Work in Progress is on at the National Theatre until 22nd March 2017, followed by a national tour. Click here for more details. 

DIRECTED BY Rufus Norris
WRITTEN BY Text from interviews with people across the UK and Carol Ann Duffy
CAST INCLUDES Seema Bowri, Cavan Clarke, Laura Elphinstone, Adam Ewan, Penny Layden, Stuart McQuarrie, Christian Patterson