A raconteur who tests our moral mettle
If you don’t know Rob Drummond’s acclaimed work, the best way to watch his new play, The Majority, is to buy a ticket on a whim and not read up about him beforehand – in particular, don’t read this review.
For those still here, The Majority, an exploration of our world post-indy Ref and post-brexit, is an intriguing play for our time: a time when the mantra “the public has spoken” has become the fallback of all fallbacks to silence dissent when dissent won’t give up.
Ostensibly, Drummond plays himself, sharing, like a Scottish pub raconteur, his own experience of the aftermath of the failed bid for Scottish independence and the subsequent leap to break away from the EU.
A man of scant political affiliation, Drummond admits his failure to vote in the Scottish referendum. But a dramatist in search of a story, he found himself among the raggle-taggle band of depressed nationalists in Glasgow’s George Square the morning after, where he met Eric Ferguson, a hardline independence fighter who then vanished into thin air. Drummond’s story follows his quest to find Ferguson and his own journey from political disinterest to violent engagement.
Drummond engages us with his story but it’s also interactive. Audience members are issued with a control, and throughout his narrative Drummond asks us to vote on a series of ethical questions, the results shown around the stage. It’s confessional memoir meets stand-up meets moral maze.
“Latecomers should be allowed in”. Yes. “Violence is sometimes the answer”. 48 per cent say yes. “A train is going to kill five people, but if you push a fat man off a bridge to block the train, it would save the five. Do you?” 71 per cent save the fat man.
Drummond has history playing with audiences’ credulity and ethics. He is by no means the candid conversationalist that he sets himself up as being. In fact, he’s a master of blurring fact with fiction and here he’s reeling us in with fictions to test our moral mettle.
By the end, Drummond transformed us from an audience, half of whom said “violence is sometimes the answer,” into an audience who almost unanimously rejected the idea that “abusing someone for holding an opinion is a helpful thing to do”. He promises to tell a different story each night depending on audience choices. It’s an impressive solo piece, and you’re guaranteed to get something you didn’t expect. On Monday it was beguiling but lacked bite. With a properly divided audience, sparks could fly.