In the confusion of the days following the Brexit vote, Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre, was particularly repelled by the political fallout. “It was the worst side of our public-school Oxbridge elite,” he says. “It felt like it was a dormitory brawl between three or four blokes.”
Tired of the shouty voices from Westminster, he decided to turn away from London and start an in-depth listening project to try to understand the roots of the divide that had fractured the country. He was aware that the National Theatre’s own position at the heart of the metropolitan elite was part of the problem, so he contacted 10 writers and directors from all over the country and asked them to start recording long interviews with people about their feelings about the vote.
“It was very clear that part of the rancour, the protest, was about the dominance of metropolitan, London-based voices telling us this is how we do things,” Norris says, in a lunchtime break between rehearsals. “We thought the thing to do was to get out and listen. As a National Theatre, if we want this place to be a centre of debate at all, it felt appropriate to start with listening.”
To begin with, he thought he might gather 1,000 voices from 100 towns and build a verbatim archive of the moment. Later, the idea evolved into My Country; A Work in Progress, a play written with Carol Ann Duffy, built from extracts of 70 long interviews. The work aims to capture the anger and shock of the summer of 2016 and to shed some light on how we got to this point.
His “gatherers” spoke to shepherds and hill farmers, shop workers and locum doctors, children and pensioners, people working in the fishing industry, people without work, citizens trying to come to terms with a rapidly changing nation. Norris listened to and transcribed 80 hours of interviews over Christmas and has simultaneously been working to write and rehearse the play. It appears to have been an exacting project to stage. When we meet, in a room overlooking the wintry, brown Thames, he is drinking Lemsip, sneezing a lot and occasionally pausing to think, holding his head in his hands, silent for a disconcertingly long time.
“I think what comes through very clearly is a strong rejection of modern politics, the selfishness, the career-driven nature of it,” he says, summarising the fury that emerges from the interviews. “Everybody is fed up with their communities being broken apart, the breakdown of the NHS, the wealth imbalance in this country. You feel a real kick against the misinformation, an awareness that everything they are being told is fiendishly biased.”
Listening to the voices, he was also struck by how utterly convinced everyone was of the supreme correctness of their own position, and a reluctance to listen to one another. As well as exploring Brexit, the play will highlight this shrivelling of empathy. “With the death in belief of the great them – whether they are politicians, kings and queens or experts – what do we believe in? We believe in ourselves. Cameras now are only used to take photos of ourselves – not of anything around us. We know we are in an age of extreme selfishness,” he says.
He hopes audiences will reflect on their own tendency to occupy the moral high ground. “I’d love them to experience some semblance of what the gatherers experienced. They came back saying how humbling it was that the more they spoke with people, the more they realised how judgmental they themselves were and how much they were living in their own bubbles.”
Norris has been careful to create a balanced picture, to the extent that his associate director has been tasked with counting each speech, and categorising it according to whether it is pro-remain or leave. The completed script has more leave voices (more than the 52% of votes to leave), in recognition of the fact that more of the audience will come from a remain position. “We have been incredibly diligent, making sure that what will inevitably be perceived as our pro-remain bias is properly balanced. We push it further the other way because you understand that the majority of people who will come to see it are likely to be on the remain side, because theatres are seen as a liberal echo chamber.”
The point of the play is to hear these voices from around the country reflecting on their lives, without pushing the audience in one direction or another. “The challenge is to keep our own personal politics out of it; the point is to give a voice to other people.”
But Norris, who voted remain, is nevertheless furious at the way the referendum was conducted, the way the media reported it, the lies, the propaganda, and the unfolding events in the US. He is uneasy at the powerful influence wielded by the Daily Mail. “How can we have an unelected person steering the country this way? Paul Dacre? Who the fuck is Paul Dacre? Who is he? Why does he have so much influence?” He has to pause, reminds himself to calm down, and laughs.
“What’s sad for me is that the referendum followed on from another referendum on these islands that was done very intelligently, where all the arguments were laid out clearly and everybody had a chance to look at both sides of the arguments and vote accordingly. The difference between that referendum and this one was massive. It was like the one we had was for idiots.”
His own voice won’t be heard in this play, but he is clear that the National Theatre has to engage with political events. The answer to “that fucking liar in America”, he says, is for those in the liberal elite “to sharpen our teeth”.
“What does theatre mean? Of course it means entertainment and provocation and the power of story as a way of understanding who we are. But increasingly it is important also that theatre is the centre of debate for what’s going on in the nation,” he says.
The play will tour the country after a short run in London, and this collaboration with regional theatres fits into Norris’s campaign to make the theatre, of which he has been director for almost two years, a properly national institution. “As soon as I started we increased the number of co-productions; last year we were at 63 different theatres. But certainly the Brexit vote has exposed that it has got to be addressed, this imbalance. We need to broaden our audiences; we need to broaden the artists who are coming in here; we certainly need to broaden where we are playing and the relationships we have around the country,” he says. “We are bringing the average age of the audience down, we have targets for BAME and gender balance. How can you be an arts institution that speaks to and for the country unless you do that?”
The voices of 70 people have been edited and distilled, and will be spoken by six actors, representing six regions of the country, who are learning their lines from recordings of the original interviews. To add drama, these voices will be interrupted by the character of Britannia, who has called together the regions to reflect on what has happened. “It gives the audience a breather from the intensity of the verbatim, which is quite demanding.” It’s hard to explain quite how it will work because no script was available. The play is being written as it is rehearsed and opens this week for previews.
For Duffy, the “human music” is “when the subjects are talking from their personal experience rather than recounting something that they have read on a website”. Norris agrees, saying that the most powerful bits of the conversation are when you have a hill farmer from Northumbria talking about the effects of EU policy on their connection with their sheep, or the voice of someone in Leicester who has lived through a mass influx of immigration.
He promises it has flashes of humour. “People are funny when they talk about stuff. Hopefully, it will be entertaining. It is an important subject, but people don’t go to the theatre to be lectured at or to be bored.”
The writers and directors who conducted the interviews are also confident that the narratives will grip the audiences. “The truth from on the ground is real and raw,” says Kieran Griffiths, a director at the Derry Playhouse, who conducted 10 interviews in Northern Ireland. “When words are not manipulated or edited to be spectacular, you get the truth: what people are afraid of and what they hope for. That’s why I think it will be gripping.”
Rhiannon White, co-artistic director of Common Wealth, a political theatre company, who also works with the National Theatre Wales, was struck by the “polar difference” between the debate in London and among the people she interviewed in Merthyr Tydfil. She hopes that the regional tour will attract a wide range of people. “I hope the audience will be quite mixed and not just a middle-class audience coming to judge the poor people,” she says. “No one is listening to each other. I want people to go in and listen, without judgment, with a desire to understand.”
• My Country: A Work in Progress is at the Dorfman, London, from 28 February until 22 March. Box office: 020-7452 3000. Then at the Citizens theatre, Glasgow, from 28 March until 1 April. Box office: 0141-429 0022). Then touring until 1 July.
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