The Majority

There's an intricate and complicated play of liveness and repetition, of reality and theatre, in Rob Drummond's The Majority. We're sitting in the Dorfman and we all have keypads on lanyards round our necks. The show is a monologue, in dialogue with us: Rob Drummond tells us a true(?) story about a chance encounter in the immediate aftermath of the Scottish Independence vote and the picaresque journey into political activism that turns on a piece of direct action that got the narrator into some trouble but also provoked an anguish realisation about what is wrong with our political discourse. At points we use the keypad to vote in response to certain questions.

Frequently during the show, Drummond - actually, I'm going to call him Rob; he seems so friendly. Frequently, during the show, Rob reassures us - or seems to be trying to reassure us - that this is all just theatre. At other moments, he seems exhilarated by moments from his story that were 'real, not just theatre'. But what is theatre and what is real in this show? As we drift out of the auditorium at the end, the screens around the stage show - or appear to show - photographs that corroborate at least some part of his story. Is the story he tells us real? He owns up to a couple of adornments to the tale, implying of course that the rest is all as it was, but is this true? As I note later, there are bits of the story that, perhaps deliberately, don't add up. I wondered often if the keypads really were working; how would we know? In fact, I wondered if my keypad was working. Not because I genuinely thought it wasn't, but I found myself frustrated that my splendid individual vote was lost anonymously in the crowd of others.

And that's part of the point. This is a show that brings firmly to the centre of our attention the flaws and burrs and conundrums of voting. We are asked probably something around 20 questions during the show. At times, I responded easily. At others, I hesitated. At moments, I wanted him to define the terms of the question more precisely. At one point, I felt the need the explain my vote (and could have). At some points, we, the audience, applauded our own votes (there was around a 90% vote against Brexit and we all burst into applause, for, what? For our own opinions. More on this later.)

And Brexit hangs heavily on this show, or specifically the Referendum does. But I guess it's going to hang heavily on most British theatre shows for a few years. The title The Majority put me immediately in mind of Alexis de Tocqueville's notion of the 'tyranny of the majority' which he observed particularly in America, but we can all feel it in the winner-takes-all logic of the Brexiteers. You lost, get over it.

There was something weird about the keypad, which somehow emphasised that curious shuttling between liveness and repetition. The keypad both felt very live - my vote was actually going to affect something that would show up on that screen up there - and repetitive - I'm making the same gesture again and again, the keypad (and the screen) is an instrument of the mediated world, plus my nagging doubts that the keypad was even working. There's a very interesting moment where he brings up the website of a Scottish neo-Nazi called Ralph Weiss. Rob tells us that he has discovered Ralph's real name and address and he wants to post it up on the guy's website. He hesitates, because this could expose the guy to danger. And we get to vote on whether he presses send or not. This feels, momentarily, like a moment of liveness with bells on (liveness plus jeopardy plus high stakes). Of course, the doubts creep in: is this actually a real website? There seemed to be a captcha box that he didn't fill in. Surely a neo-Nazi with a personal website would set his site up so he approved comments before they appeared? SPOILER ALERT: And now I do a bit of googling and it looks like this was actually a fake. I feel slightly disappointed.

This moment, though, takes us into the darker and more important questions of the show. SPOILER ALERT: the turning point in his story is when he has been drawn into a political action, a counter-demonstration against fascists (probably) who are protesting against Syrian immigrants being allowed to settle in Scotland. Later he sees one of the fascists (probably) with his guard down and he punches him in the face. For this he gets a suspended sentence and the growing sense that this is exactly what is wrong with our politics. We have become so polarised, we risk dehumanising the opposition, to the point where we feel it is acceptable to assault someone physically because of their opinions. This nagging concern builds, thanks to what is either (a) an elegant (and oddly old-fashioned) dramaturgical device involving a letter or (b) something that actually happened, into an impassioned call for dialogue, for respecting one another's point of view, for saying, when encountering people with whom we disagree 'That's fascinating. Why do you believe what you believe?'

As someone who has, like Rob (really or fictionally), engaged in Twitter battles with alt-right nutters with their Pepe avatars and endlessly repeated vocabulary (cuck, libtard, liberal tears, Kek, virtue signalling, etc.), this hits home to me. Perhaps the liberals and the left did spend too much time abusing Trump's supporters as racists and not enough time trying to understand their position and discussing it with them. Perhaps the liberal elites of the metropolitan centres did dismiss the views of the Brexit voters and maybe that's been going on for decades. Perhaps we do talk to ourselves too much. Perhaps a lot of our political engagement is like this audience, applauding one another for correctly holding our beliefs. 

But here's where the liveness of the show is complicated. I think it would have been very different watching this show a week ago. At one point, Rob laments that we all too easily describe our opponents as Nazis and racists. But Charlotteville is surely a reminder that some of our opponents are Nazis and racists. When Rob tries to remind us that they're not all Nazis, it's hard not to hear an echo of Donald Trump's oily prevarications ('not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me' he said in his disastrous, repulsive press conference on Tuesday). Rob worries that we have got ourselves to a point where we think it's okay to assault people because of what they believe, but again, I hear an echo of Trump, focusing only on the actions and not the broader picture. As it happens, I am uneasy about using violence as a political weapon, though to see all violence as intrinsically the same is to indulge in Trumpian moral equivalence (isn't it?). I wouldn't have thought these things - or at least not with the same force - a week ago. The liveness of the show means that the ground is shifting beneath it. Its liveness almost undoes the show. At the moment, it must be an extraordinary thing to perform, because the resonances of these debates are urgent and changing all the time.

Which is probably why I'd like the moral temperature of the show to be turned up a bit. Rob Drummond is a terrific performer: mild, outraged, likeable, sweet in manner, which means that when he punches the guy, it wrongfoots you in an interesting way. It feels odd, but interestingly odd. It's shocking, barely credible. But, for me, the keypad-voting device never lets the intensity of the debates ratchet up enough. There's always a certain novelty feeling to it - even when we're answering one of the many variants of the Trolley Problem - not helped by a kind of gameshow theme tune that rings out each time. The technology feels maybe gimmicky? I felt the same thing a few years ago in Rimini Protokoll's Best Before where we all had a handset and played a kind of video game through the show. Maybe I just don't go for that sort of thing, but it feels lighter than I think it should. 

The show leads to a final vote where we are asked whether it is ever helpful to be abusive to people (Rob explains 'physically or verbally') for the opinions they hold. He has steered us pretty strongly to say no. I voted yes. Why? Not because I think you should punch people for their beliefs. And not because I think it is 'helpful' to shout 'racist' at someone who admits to some mild discomfort with immigration. But what counts as abusive? How about mockery? I suppose I think it can be helpful to mock someone's beliefs because it's a ferocious way of communicating that some beliefs are ludicrous. And then, what is a belief? Beliefs aren't private mental attitudes locked quietly away in our heads are they? If I know what someone's belief is, it's because they've expressed it and expressing a belief is an action. When the protestors attacked the white supremacists in Charlottesville, it wasn't because of the white supremacists' beliefs: it was because they were expressing those beliefs by marching with torches, shouting fascist slogans, using paramilitary groups to intimidate people, and focusing their actions on defending a symbol of support for slavery. Of course not everyone who voted for Trump is a neo-Nazi. Not everyone who voted for Brexit is a racist. But equally we shouldn't let some elaboration of Godwin's Law stop us from identifying and calling out the rise of genuine fascism - and we are seeing the emboldened resurgence of fascism, here and in America and elsewhere.

Rob tells us that dialogue is vital. He thinks difference of opinion is important. If we all thought the same, we'd learn nothing. And he tells us that he's going to the Dorfman foyer and he wants to talk to us. I could have said this stuff to him, but he already had a crowd round him and I decided to go home. But it's to the show's credit that as I cycled home, I felt like a heel for foreclosing the dialogue.

I liked this show immensely and David Overend has done wonderful things with an admirably light touch. I kind of disagreed with it more and more as it went on, but that's surely good. It provoked me and I can feel there's a rather jumpy defensive quality to what I've written here. It's got under my skin. It's in the round, which feels right and democratic. There's a hexagon structure suspended above the stage that refers to the bees that one of the figures in the story keeps, but also suggests 'hive mind'. It reminded me of a number of shows that have that same indeterminate mixture of reality and fiction, the story sitting on a borderline of comedy and darkness, that tone of amiable despair. I think of Daniel Kitson, obviously, but also the podcast S-Town. There are just touches of Tim Crouch in the riddling theatrical playfulness. The show is superimposed somewhat on the Mosquitoes set. This feels appropriate because it gives the show a pleasingly provisional quality; it resists the monolithic. It is a quietly profound piece of theatre.

Mosquitoes

One of the things I love about Lucy Kirkwood is that she never repeats herself. None of her plays are like each other. Chimerica is nothing like Tinderbox is nothing like it felt empty when the heart went... is nothing like NSFW is nothing like The Children is nothing like Mosquitoes. There are some motifs that run through the plays - moments of desperate moral choice, people living with their own terrible decisions, relations between the old and the young, a feminist vein running through everything - but really, if you'd seen Chimerica, would you have guessed that the same woman wrote NSFW? And I think that's an admirable thing. Kirkwood has a restless talent; she pushes herself with everything she writes. This is exposing, of course; the risks of failure suddenly flare up bold and bright when you start with a new dramatic form.

Interestingly (if I haven't imagined this), but this actually seems something more typical of women playwrights this century than men. Moira Buffini's plays are virtually unrecognisable one to another. Lucy Prebble goes somewhere entirely new with each play. There are perhaps some stylistic echoes between Alice Birch's plays, but the forms and structures and tones are always new. Maybe it's the influence of our great dramaturgical shape-shifter, Caryl Churchill, who has never written the same play twice, who invents extraordinary new structures and techniques and then never uses them again. There are echoes of Churchill in Kirkwood (as there are in virtually anyone decent writing now). Last year, I bookended my theatregoing with Churchill's Escaped Alone and Kirkwood's The Children, a beautiful (though, I'm sure, inintentional) pairing about old age, England, and terrible calamity, both marked by surprising and heart-stopping moments of music and deep personal pain.

So what's the new one? Mosquitoes is set over three years between 2006 and 2009. Jenny and Alice are sisters. Alice is a physicist who lives in Geneva for most of the play, where she works in the CERN Laboratory on the Large Hadron Collider. Jenny, on the other hand, is a sarcy, funny, wastrel who believes what she reads on the internet. When we first meet her she is pregnant but later we discover that as a result of her refusal to give her new child the MMR vaccine, the girl dies of a preventable disease. She visits Alice in Geneva, where Alice's son, Luke, is having difficulties in his Swiss school, forlornly pursuing a girl, living on his computer, and getting into fights. At one point he runs away and Alice is frantic. Meanwhile Jenny is on a downward spiral of self-destruction. When Luke returns, but is humiliated by his would-be girlfriend, who sends his cock pic around the school. He sends a virus into the CERN network, via his mum's laptop, but Jenny takes the blame. This leads to a near-final rupture between the sisters, but a year later they appear possibly on the path to reconciliation at Jenny reveals she is pregnant again.

The tone of this one is deceptive. It starts very light, very funny, but it gets darker and more alarming, mining comedy out of pain, but also pain out of the comedy. There are also science lectures, of a sort, about the end of the world and alternative universes. Jenny's character is particularly interesting (it made me think a little about Mary in Common which I saw last night); initially she is lovably scatty and enjoyably caustic, but her waywardness has terrible consequences and her behaviour becomes reckless, self-destructive and also just destructive. The smiles freeze on our faces. The loss of children haunts this play, a metaphor perhaps for the indeterminacy of our physical microverse (Heisenberg is mentioned at one point): in all of our lives we either know how fast we're travelling or where we're going but never at the same time, which makes our wanderings so hard to control. And there is something elegantly simple but also resonant in the central presence of the LHC, ramming these protons at each other and hoping to produce some invisible other particle, that suggests the way that our orderly lives may just be chaotic collisions of unpredictable people, but also that through all the chaos there is the regularity of something produced, be it love, be it the Higgs Boson.

But also, and I apologise for the crass way I'm going to say it, but this is also one of the first really powerful plays about Brexit and Trump. This is a play about our terrible ability to believe plausible lies, the way a lurking irrationality can have us all replicate and pass on nonsense just because on some egoistic level, it feels like it should be right. More literally we have Trump's contempt for the climate scientists (it's all just opinion) and Gove's disregard of experts. In a way, the visions of catastrophe in this play (we are given six scenarios for the end of the universe) seem also fearful visions, on a more domestic level, of the consequences of our electrostatic attraction to the lie. Various kinds of nonsense ripple through the play: praying, crystals, pseudo-science, horoscopes, innumeracy, racism, dementia, and Andrew Wakefield's cruel campaign against MMR The play swims in a world of lies: even at the turning on of the LHC, we see a reporter ask the scientists if there's a risk that it will create a black hole that will destroy the earth. But these are the waters we, too, swim in. This year we're drowning in them.

It's a very fine production, with a superb cast, led magnificently by Olivia Coleman (hilarious, wicked, desperate) and Olivia Williams (cool, elegant, fragile, desperate). Rufus Norris keeps things moving beautifully, the play, in the round, vaguely suggesting an atom, without making too much of that. There are hints of Frayn's Copenhagen, of Payne's Constellations, and of Haddon/Stephens's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime in the play and the production. Amanda Boxer is the two women's mother is particular fine, a dignified (but deluded?) long-suffering woman, sensing a gradual and permanent decline of her mind.

It's a hugely enjoyable play and yet quietly shattering at moments. The play is at its best when the two sisters are on stage together, not just because of the performances, but because here, I think, is where the writing is most heartfelt. And it's also where the writing is funniest; the opening scene is just breathlessly funny. And there are some wonderful moments, particularly for Jenny, who is an unforgivably brilliant creation and a total pain. There's a marvellous scene (SPOILER ALERT) where she talks to Luke who has just discovered his viral humiliation: Jenny asks to look at the picture so she can assess how embarrassing this is. Her response - 'Okay, so that's a great cock' - is so wonderfully inappropriate, so complicated (does she mean it or is she making it up to make him feel better? which would be even worse) and yet works so well. And there's another, smaller moment that moved me to tears. The scientists have found a way to turn the data on the higgs boson into sound and there's a competition to turn this sound into music. Alice asks Luke to have a go - he's good with computers and music. Initially he refuses, but later, in an almost wordless scene, we see him give the headphones to his mother and she listens, only half trusting him, only half getting it, but moved nonetheless.

There are things I wasn't sure about. I think the science imagery is quite diffuse and varied, which tends to have a centrifugal effect on the play, though I held onto the bits that touched me and stored away the other stuff to think about later. I got slightly lost around Luke's disappearance, not entirely sure how long he'd been missing, nor why Alice doesn't know he's back, when the whole school has just received a photo of his cock; and then it seemed odd to me that Alice needles him so quickly when you'd think she'd just be relieved to have him home. I noted that in the script, she begins the second half with a long speech about the end of the world. Presumably to balance the two halves (and not make, cardinal sin, the second half longer than the first), the speech has been moved to the end of the first half. This seems to me a mistake. Kirkwood's instincts are right about where to take the interval and the force of that speech is compromised in its new position.

It's a ferocious, funny and moving play. Lucy Kirkwood is writing prolifically right now but, like Heisenberg's electron, we can know her velocity, but not her direction. I can't wait to see where she goes next.

Common

I've been living abroad for a year and a half and have felt very unplugged from British theatre. Indeed, after we had our first baby a year ago, I've felt pretty unplugged from all theatre. But we got back on Monday and tonight I saw my first theatre show for some months: Common by D C Moore.

Now, don't get me wrong: I wasn't so unplugged that I'd heard nothing about the furore attached to this production. I'd heard there were some terrible  reviews, rumours of walkouts, cancelled previews, last-minute major surgery on the play and the production, a small firestorm of user comments on Time Out. But I didn't really engage too much with that. I didn't read any of the reviews. I couldn't actually find the user comments when I briefly tried to look, and it's not as if cancelled previews are unprecedented at the National. That's part of what previews are for.

So I went in kind of fresh, maybe with a small warning bell that this might be a tough evening. But what can I tell you, dear reader? I don't know if the production's just grown into its own skin or the detractors are all dimwits, but Common is a fantastic play, given a roaring and thrilling production by Jeremy Herrin.

What's it about? Oh Jesus, don't ask me. Loosely, we're in the early nineteenth century and Mary has returned to the rural common lands where she grew up. She is seeking the girl she loved before faking her own death and fleeing. But changes are afoot; specifically, the enclosure movement is going full throttle - the common land is being privatised. This is creating considerable tension both between the peasantry and the newly-landed gentry but also between different peasant factions: the English and Irish, protestants and catholics. Mary is blessed with a gift for mind-reading (probably) and for mischief (certainly) and she starts by twisting the locals around her finger. But she stirs up more tension than is good for her because her lover rejects her and the peasantry, in a strange rural ceremony, bury her alive. She survives this, miraculously, and is brought into the house of the local Lord, with whom she forms an unlikely alliance. She confronts her lover again and they seem to kill each other, though, again, Mary survives and now rules the manor house. She is on top and it seems her mixture of mischief and cruelty will be the making of our world too.

If that seems a little strange, well that's because it is. It's a very strange play, full of wickedly perverse ideas and images: a dead dog, a dead crow carrying the soul of a dead father, a countryside rite, endless reaping and hoeing, sapphic passions, incestuous passions, several deaths and rebirths, and always, everywhere the land, the land. The Olivier stage is covered in earth and we feel the failing of the harvest throughout. It's (literally) earthy and this anchors the writing. It's a production that could inflame your hay fever. In fact it did inflame my hay fever.

D C Moore has created a new theatrical language for this play. It's not trying exactly to represent historical period, but rather to give a sense of a whole different world. The language is coarse and poetic, funny and visceral. It's a staggering achievement and it's remarkably sustained the whole way through. Just listen to this lovely stuff:

The Cock Inn. I know madam, I know. A gentleman's inn at the far-roughest edge of this wideParish, that no gentleman is ever in, unless it's all changes these allyears since. But go we must: Destiny demands it. No, I do. And my quest. Oh yes you don't know yet my Name or Intent. You'll learn both, in the soonbloody mists of time. Just mean later, madam. In a bit. But do remember, please: rest not your faith on a single syllable I heretell. Unless you cannot resist me, which I'll allunderstand. You are not, as I have been all too-long: alone.

That mixture of music hall, of neologism, of dirty joke and tugging emotion, the storytelling and the world-building, but all of it totally theatrical. (Say it out loud if you don't believe me. It's language that moves the air - and in fact I think that's a phrase from the play.) I think the critics who have slagged this off can have no idea how bloody difficult it is to create a style like this and sustain it without it turning into self-indulgent word-mush. This play is full-throated and theatrical and funny (god it's funny).

What's it about? I'll be honest, only just got home, haven't had time to process it really, I might have a better idea in a week or so. But I like that. There are puzzles in the play: what Mary's real 'Intent' is. She starts absolutely as our heroine and guide, but as it goes on she seems less and less reliable and more and more sinister. What we are to do with that complexity is part of the fun of watching this play. It reminded me a lot of Howard Barker in the 1980s: those scenes where characters that we have come to like do something unconscionably vile to shake off any affection and make us ask hard questions about how easily we take sides, the clichéd barbarism of our morality. I also liked the way the play seems to be about the enclosures (and it is, a bit) but it's much more complex and epic and it shows huge sweeps of characters and the effects of not just putting up a few fences but the entire mindset that was changing right through the eighteenth century. It utterly resists the urge to be narrow. 

I mentioned Barker and actually the play really took me back to that wave of plays from the early seventies to the mid-eighties, those epic historical plays that mix poetry and dirt, politics and laughter. Particularly those plays with a kind of rural element to them that seem to draw something from that earth that is somehow not wholly rational to make the language dance. I'm thinking of Storey's Cromwell, Bond's Bingo or The Fool, Barnes's Red Noses, Brenton's The Romans in Britain, Churchill's Fen, Barker's Victory or The Castle, Robert Holman's Other Worlds, almost anything by David Rudkin. It's not like the more recent rural plays like Stuart Paterson's King of the Fields, Richard Bean's Harvest, or Jez Butterworth's Night Heron, The Winterling or Jerusalem. Paterson and Bean's plays don't have quite the same magic; Butterworth's have the magic but not the scale. These latter plays are partly about a domesticated countryside, seen cautiously, at one remove. This just goes for it. I've not seen a play go for it like this for a long time.

The cast is wonderful. Cush Jumbo (the ex-lover) is, as always, magnetic, somehow both elegant and ferocious. I absolutely adored Lois Chimimba as Eggy Tom, a lad who carries his father's soul in a crow around with him, and enjoyably seems sometimes to see us watching the play (who then seems to be reincarnated as a chamber maid with aspirations). Tim McMullan is funny and sinister, scary and pitiful as the syphilitic English Lord. Brian Doherty, Trevor Fox and John Dalgleish are superb as various members of the warring factions. But Anne-Marie Duff, oh dear God, this is such a fierce, funny, sexy, scary performance. She plays it like Shakespeare in a way, in the sense that she's putting a whole world on stage and doing so with delicacy and poetry, but it's completely lived and present. Glenda Jackson once said that Howard Barker's plays had 'writing you can taste in the mouth'. That's what this is and the joy is seeing Anne-Marie Duff dancing with it. The production is pretty great and I'd like to single out Paule Constable's lighting, which is just breathtaking in the use of dramatic side lighting, the occasional flashes of colour, and the versatile use of the cyc so that characters are sometimes reduced to shadow puppets or multiplied spectrally in shadow.

No it's not perfect. What ever is? There are some things that maybe don't quite mesh. Most difficult is the second half. Looking quickly at the published text, it looks as though there have been some pretty savage cuts inflicted on the second half. And I can see why; there's a certain level of complication that repeats the rhythmic patterns of the first half which would seem to slow the whole thing down: we want to get to some kind of moment of clarity or of striking climactic complexity and the play is probably a bit long. But, cutting for pace, they've disrupted the internal rhythm of several scenes, and occasionally I felt we were watching a kind of 'highlights' version of the second half, so quickly was plot spilling out over the stage. This tension between pace and rhythm is always there; it's a little bit a tension between art and entertainment and a bit of that tension is a good thing. Here it feels like pace won out but I'd have liked more faith in the rhythm.

And the production,. while good, feels oddly reserved about the Olivier. In particular, I sometimes kept wanting to pull the action a foot or two nearer us. The actors hugged the middle and rear of the stage a little. I wondered if this was directorial - Duff being the only one permitted far downstage because it gives her that privileged access to us. Maybe, maybe not. I think it would be wrong anyway, just Anne-Marie Duff's turn of the head and that cheeky crooked smile is another to single her out for us.

But these are quibbles. Common is great. Please give it a go.