Brexit, in our own words
It’s a difficult job, but somebody’s got to do it. British theatre’s first major response to the EU referendum and the prospect of Brexit has involved a Herculean effort to get out among the public in the wake of the vote and relay the thoughts of “ordinary people” at this volatile juncture of national history.
Enlisting the help of regional arts organisations, the National Theatre dispatched interviewers to glean the general mood and particular memories of that seismic moment – a project akin to the Mass Observation movement of the Thirties. The resulting material, hundreds of hours worth, drawn from citizens ranging in age from nine to 97, was dutifully sifted by Rufus Norris, director of the National, and Carol Ann Duffy, the Poet Laureate, while most of us were relaxing over Christmas.
The fruit of the pair’s speedy labours is surprisingly succinct. Although it’s hardly the stuff of startling revelation, it serves as a fascinating document of popular sentiment, its concerns and contradictions, and, for all its lapses into generalisation and even bigotry, its broad decency and basic humility.
If anything, the bias is towards the Leave camp. The non-naturalistic conceit is that Britannia, the trident-bearing personification of Great Britain, has convened six representatives from constituent parts of the UK to deliver the gathered testimonies. The tone is at once seriousminded (these ambassadors are smartcasual, bearing briefcases, holding aloft photos of the interviewees) and tongue-in-cheek (their arrival heralded by a combative blast of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes).
With London and the South East exempt from the party, Remoaners are thin on the ground and members of the metropolitan liberal elite may need to reach for the chianti to wash away their distaste at some of what they hear. Amid innocuous reflections on the divide between haves and have-nots in Caledonia, or the changes in farming life in the North East, are more aggrieved appraisals of perceived welfare injustices, mass immigration and the shifting demographic: “’S not a burka, it’s a balaclava” comes one complaint from the South West (voiced by Adam Ewan). Those who love to sneer at the inarticulacy of the great unwashed won’t be altogether disappointed, but the soundbites we also hear from leading politicians – with Boris in particular impersonated at his most rhetorically ripe – creates a neat level-playing field of non-sequiturs.
The over-riding impression is of the way personal perspectives are bound up with geographical location and of a proud island nation staring into the unknown (strains of Elgar are inevitably heard). Duffy contributes a subtle poetic sensibility – with Penny Layden’s Britannia repeatedly urging us to “Listen” to this collective outpouring (a refrain in Under Milk
Wood, too) and acquiring an aspect of maternal, omniscient concern.
Norris keeps it all pacey and playful, conscious that there’s no decisive element of drama and that it’s only a whisker away from being a glorified session of Question Time. By a decent enough margin, though – I’d say roughly by 52 per cent to 48 per cent – it escapes that charge. Result!