THEATRE From The Ground Up Assembly Roxy (Venue 139) JJJ

In this new show by a group of young people drawn together by the Almeida Theatre in London, Joeri Smets, the award-winning wordsmith and dramaturge of the acclaimed Belgian company Ontroerend Goed, works with the ten-strong company to create an intriguing show about binary yes-no decisionmaking, and how it can both misrepresent and distort our social reality.

In the basement space of Assembly Roxy, the young performers instruct the audience to stand on a series of marks on the floor, and take paces to right or left according to their yes-no answers to a series of questions about their character preferences – questions which become more directly political as the show progresses, touching on subjects like individualism and collectivism, or the right of Muslim women to wear a veil.

No direct reference is made to the recent referendum debates on Brexit or Scottish independence, both of which left societies divided along a near 50/50 fault-line. Yet the implication is clear; and if the style of the show is sometimes bullying to the point of being unpleasant, that is perhaps part of its point, about an increasingly populist political system that demands our yes-no answer to a question we wouldn’t have asked in the first place, and which requires a much more nuanced response.