How does a self-professed “national” arts institution begin to represent a nation bitterly divided? It's a question that's been plaguing National Theatre Artistic Director Rufus Norris who, together with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, has attempted to condense a plethora of views and voices on the UK's most contentious subject into a single 90-minute play.
Almost a year on from the shock results of Britain's EU referendum, it feels as though everyone – from scientists to celebrities, politicians to pollsters and traditional journalists to Twitterati – is still scrabbling to respond. Unlike most, however, Norris has resisted the temptation to air his own views on the matter – at least on stage. Rather than analysing or proselytising, his My Country; A Work in Progress is instead an extended listening project, composed primarily of a series of interviews conducted with ordinary people from across the UK.
“After the referendum, I felt very strongly that we needed to have a response, but also that the response should be led by listening to people rather than us saying, 'This is what we think,'” says Norris. “Already, there was too much of a London voice in the whole build-up to the referendum, and the rejection of that was reflected in the very strong protest vote that was the result.”
Crucially though, the finished show would not simply be a way of “explaining” the rest of the country to regular visitors to the theatre's London Southbank home, but would also tour around the UK, holding a mirror up to fragmented communities and polarised opinions wherever it went. It's as part of this tour that the production comes to Warwick Arts Centre and Birmingham REP in May.
The project began with a group of interviewers from a range of theatre and community-based backgrounds heading out to harvest opinions on their home turf. A total of 80 interviews were then hurriedly transcribed and cut down into manageable chunks ready to be given to the cast.
“We did give the interviewers a list of questions to ask, but it was up to the person to respond in the way they felt most pertinent. So in Leicester, immigration was a big theme, whereas in the North East, the fishing industry and farming subsidies became prevalent topics. In Northern Ireland, we thought Derry would be an interesting place to talk about borders and nationalism.”
Contributors and the extent to which each of them features in the final play were then selected with a view to what Carol Ann Duffy has described as “human music”.
“What she meant by that was people talking with passion from a position of experience. So the woman in Leicester who talks in what might be described as racist terms is talking from the position of someone who has seen her community change beyond recognition in a very short space of time, while the man talking about the fishing industry in the North East remembers Amble Harbour being five boats deep, where now there are hardly any boats at all.”
“When somebody's talking about what they've read on their Facebook news or in their little echo chamber – whether it's The Guardian or The Daily Mail – it's not that interesting to listen to. This is human music because it's based in rich experience.”
It's not the first time Norris has used of verbatim interviews in a production – his critically acclaimed musical London Road famously employed a similar device back in 2011. Nevertheless, from a director's perspective, creating My Country has been an altogether different experience.
“[Making London Road] was a longer process. From the first time [writer] Alecky Blythe went into Ipswich to the night we opened the show was probably about four years. Also, to a degree, that had a story. This isn't a story; it's a political moment. There can be no answers. We can't put something on stage that says, 'And they all lived happily ever after,' or 'It's a tragedy,' because we don't know. Article 50's only just been delivered so it will be another ten years before we really have a sense of what this moment means and whether any of the frustrations people expressed will be addressed.”
This is partly explains the subtitle – it's not just the country, but also the play itself that could be said to be “A Work in Progress”. Searching for a structure on which to hang the material collected, Norris hit on the idea of a personified Britannia, calling a conference of her regions in an attempt to solve the complex problems facing them. Each featured region acts as a mouthpiece for its people, literally voicing their concerns. Added to the interviews are elements of in-character “banter” between the different regions, as well as more poetic sections penned by Duffy.
As Poet Laureate, Duffy was an obvious choice to for playwright, finding herself in a similar position to Norris as a national representative of her art. But there were other considerations, too.
“She lives in Manchester so she's not a London voice, and I knew it needed to be a writer who was going to respond and be very interested in what people had to say. Also, it's a very pressured time when you're putting a show like this together in a short period of time, so it needed somebody with a cool head. We'd worked together before, so I knew we'd get on very well.”
Not every part of the country gets a look in. London may have been a conscious exclusion, but on top of this, time and resources made limitations necessary, meaning that neither the North West (home to Carol Ann Duffy) nor the West Midlands (Norris originally hails from Worcestershire and has worked extensively in Birmingham) are featured.
“We started with people in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and after that we looked at how we could diversify it. The East Midlands was our first location in England, so we felt we had to go north and south to balance it out. In the end we settled on the North East and South West, but if there's a follow-up, it will obviously go to the areas we didn't visit this time.”
In a sense, the impossibility of reflecting the entire country in a single show is like a microcosm of Norris' job at large – though so far he's shown no sign of shrinking from the challenge.
“We're massively stepping up our nationwide work, which is really important because there are a lot of people who feel, in quite a justified way, that London receives too much of the national budget in terms of arts provision. It's really important that institutions like this get out and about a lot more, whether through co-productions or cinema broadcasts.
“We've also got various productions coming up that I feel speak in different ways to the issues of the time, and I think we will continue to try to participate in the national debate as much as possible. We have got another long-term verbatim piece that we're developing, but let's see how it pans out. I'm keeping a close eye on that Scottish situation!”
My Country; A Work in Progress is at Birmingham REP 16-20 May and Warwick Arts Centre 25-27 May.
How does a self-professed “national” arts institution begin to represent a nation bitterly divided? It's a question that's been plaguing National Theatre Artistic Director Rufus Norris who, together with Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, has attempted to condense a plethora of views and voices on the UK's most contentious subject into a single 90-minute play.
Almost a year on from the shock results of Britain's EU referendum, it feels as though everyone – from scientists to celebrities, politicians to pollsters and traditional journalists to Twitterati – is still scrabbling to respond. Unlike most, however, Norris has resisted the temptation to air his own views on the matter – at least on stage. Rather than analysing or proselytising, his My Country; A Work in Progress is instead an extended listening project, composed primarily of a series of interviews conducted with ordinary people from across the UK.
“After the referendum, I felt very strongly that we needed to have a response, but also that the response should be led by listening to people rather than us saying, 'This is what we think,'” says Norris. “Already, there was too much of a London voice in the whole build-up to the referendum, and the rejection of that was reflected in the very strong protest vote that was the result.”
Crucially though, the finished show would not simply be a way of “explaining” the rest of the country to regular visitors to the theatre's London Southbank home, but would also tour around the UK, holding a mirror up to fragmented communities and polarised opinions wherever it went. It's as part of this tour that the production comes to Warwick Arts Centre and Birmingham REP in May.
The project began with a group of interviewers from a range of theatre and community-based backgrounds heading out to harvest opinions on their home turf. A total of 80 interviews were then hurriedly transcribed and cut down into manageable chunks ready to be given to the cast.
“We did give the interviewers a list of questions to ask, but it was up to the person to respond in the way they felt most pertinent. So in Leicester, immigration was a big theme, whereas in the North East, the fishing industry and farming subsidies became prevalent topics. In Northern Ireland, we thought Derry would be an interesting place to talk about borders and nationalism.”
Contributors and the extent to which each of them features in the final play were then selected with a view to what Carol Ann Duffy has described as “human music”.
“What she meant by that was people talking with passion from a position of experience. So the woman in Leicester who talks in what might be described as racist terms is talking from the position of someone who has seen her community change beyond recognition in a very short space of time, while the man talking about the fishing industry in the North East remembers Amble Harbour being five boats deep, where now there are hardly any boats at all.”
“When somebody's talking about what they've read on their Facebook news or in their little echo chamber – whether it's The Guardian or The Daily Mail – it's not that interesting to listen to. This is human music because it's based in rich experience.”
It's not the first time Norris has used of verbatim interviews in a production – his critically acclaimed musical London Road famously employed a similar device back in 2011. Nevertheless, from a director's perspective, creating My Country has been an altogether different experience.
“[Making London Road] was a longer process. From the first time [writer] Alecky Blythe went into Ipswich to the night we opened the show was probably about four years. Also, to a degree, that had a story. This isn't a story; it's a political moment. There can be no answers. We can't put something on stage that says, 'And they all lived happily ever after,' or 'It's a tragedy,' because we don't know. Article 50's only just been delivered so it will be another ten years before we really have a sense of what this moment means and whether any of the frustrations people expressed will be addressed.”
This is partly explains the subtitle – it's not just the country, but also the play itself that could be said to be “A Work in Progress”. Searching for a structure on which to hang the material collected, Norris hit on the idea of a personified Britannia, calling a conference of her regions in an attempt to solve the complex problems facing them. Each featured region acts as a mouthpiece for its people, literally voicing their concerns. Added to the interviews are elements of in-character “banter” between the different regions, as well as more poetic sections penned by Duffy.
As Poet Laureate, Duffy was an obvious choice to for playwright, finding herself in a similar position to Norris as a national representative of her art. But there were other considerations, too.
“She lives in Manchester so she's not a London voice, and I knew it needed to be a writer who was going to respond and be very interested in what people had to say. Also, it's a very pressured time when you're putting a show like this together in a short period of time, so it needed somebody with a cool head. We'd worked together before, so I knew we'd get on very well.”
Not every part of the country gets a look in. London may have been a conscious exclusion, but on top of this, time and resources made limitations necessary, meaning that neither the North West (home to Carol Ann Duffy) nor the West Midlands (Norris originally hails from Worcestershire and has worked extensively in Birmingham) are featured.
“We started with people in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and after that we looked at how we could diversify it. The East Midlands was our first location in England, so we felt we had to go north and south to balance it out. In the end we settled on the North East and South West, but if there's a follow-up, it will obviously go to the areas we didn't visit this time.”
In a sense, the impossibility of reflecting the entire country in a single show is like a microcosm of Norris' job at large – though so far he's shown no sign of shrinking from the challenge.
“We're massively stepping up our nationwide work, which is really important because there are a lot of people who feel, in quite a justified way, that London receives too much of the national budget in terms of arts provision. It's really important that institutions like this get out and about a lot more, whether through co-productions or cinema broadcasts.
“We've also got various productions coming up that I feel speak in different ways to the issues of the time, and I think we will continue to try to participate in the national debate as much as possible. We have got another long-term verbatim piece that we're developing, but let's see how it pans out. I'm keeping a close eye on that Scottish situation!”
My Country; A Work in Progress is at Birmingham REP 16-20 May and Warwick Arts Centre 25-27 May.