Meet a comedian who tests our moral mettle: The Majority, National Theatre, review
If you don’t know the writer and performer Rob Drummond’s acclaimed work then the best way to watch his new play, The Majority, is to buy a ticket on a whim and not read up about him beforehand – in particular don’t read this review.
Spoiler alert over. For those still with me, The Majority, an exploration of our world post-Scottish independence and post-Brexit referenda votes, is an intriguing play for our time: a time when the mantra “the public has spoken” has become the fall-back of all fall-backs to silence dissent when dissent won’t give up the ghost.
Ostensibly, Drummond plays himself, sharing, like a Scottish pub raconteur, his own experience of the aftermath of the failed bid for Scottish independence and Britain’s subsequent leap to break away from Europe. A man of scant political affiliation, Drummond admits his failure to vote either way in the Scottish referendum.
But a dramatist in search of a story, he found himself among the raggle-taggle band of depressed nationalists in Glasgow’s George Square the morning after the vote, where he met Eric Ferguson, a hardline independence fighter who then vanished into thin air. Drummond’s story follows his quest to track down Ferguson and his own journey from political disinterest to violent engagement.
Prowling an in-the-round stage, Drummond engages us with his private story but also with interactive technology. Every audience member is issued with a remote control and throughout his narrative Drummond asks us to vote on a series of more or less serious ethical questions, the results instantly broadcast on screens around the stage.
It’s confessional memoir meets stand-up meets moral maze. “I believe latecomers should be allowed in”. We vote yes. “I believe violence is sometimes the answer”. 48.84 per cent of us vote yes. If a runaway train were going to kill five railway workers, but if you pushed one fat man off the bridge to block the train it would save them, would you? 71 per cent of us save the fat man.
Drummond has history playing with audiences’ credulity and ethics. He’s by no means the candid conversationalist that he sets himself up as being. In fact, he’s a master of blurring fact with fiction and here – as in /Bullet Catch/, in which he inveigled a member of the audience to take part in a potentially fatal magic trick, and /In Fidelity/, in which he persuaded audience members to try to find love – he’s reeling us in with fictions to test our moral mettle. Is this emotional story true? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.
By the end, Drummond’s’s transformed us from an audience, half of whom voted that “violence is sometimes the answer”, into an audience who almost unanimously rejected the idea that “abusing someone for holding an opinion is a helpful thing to do”. Over a 20-night residency, he promises to tell a different story each night depending on the audience’s choices.
It’s an impressive piece of solo performance, and, whenever you go, you’re guaranteed to get something you didn’t expect. On Monday night it was beguiling but lacked bite, but with a properly divided audience sparks could fly.
Until August 28. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk
