Review by Kate Gaul
Present day anxieties surface in YESYESNO’s production of “Nation” at Edinburgh Fringe. To borrow from a blurb “a nation, according to the political theorist and historian Benedict Arnold, is an imagined community.” This play performed ostensibly by a single actor, Sam Ward, attempts to construct a community from the audience and exposes the rot at its core. Sam Ward is also the writer. His previous work has been impactful - “Five Encounters on a Site Called Craigslist” and “we were promised honey!”. These works and now “Nation” extol Ward’s approach to theatre. They all use direct address storytelling, often in the second person. They play with ambiguity and honesty, liveness and unpredictability, distance and disruption. They often integrate audience interaction in interesting, exciting ways, too.
“Nation” explores themes of intolerance and xenophobia and how we construct our reality. Theatre is the metaphor. On a bare stage with minimal technical elements one actor casts the townsfolk. Amongst the cast are a butcher, a drama teacher, a Pilates instructor, a small dog and a body lying in a pool of blood. We are told to imagine parts of the town has he describes it. He becomes different characters too – a postman, a politician. He reassures us that we are “doing well”. And so, a story unfolds of a town where a woman retires from her job, a stranger arrives on the doorstep of her party and over the course of three months things start happening in the town that make people scared, lost, angry. Things start disappearing – and not just small things but complete buildings and chunks of the town. Someone must be to blame. There is violence. There is always “the other”.
The entirely white middle class looking audience (well, the day I attended) become complicit from the beginning and a startling twist in the proceedings. It would be a complete spoiler to describe what happens here. In the ongoing explosions of anti-immigration upheavals which are ever present in UK – an elsewhere in the world has their own version of this – the play feels of the moment. And yet it was ever thus. But I never really felt the play landed as you can see the intention of it from the start and nothing is resolved, challenged or concluded. Are we as an audience imagining the same things? We are not and this is how “Nation” illustrates the chaotic difference amongst a seeming homogenous experience.
Truth as they say is stranger than fiction and any pretence “Nation” has at prescience is somewhat undermined by our current lived realities.
I wasn’t entirely comfortable with the constant praise for the audience in being able to us our imagination. I just wished the central character would get on with it and not presume that we were happy “in our role”. I wanted more critique. We know that communities are disenfranchised and that many feel inarticulate in the face of societal pressures. Many cannot speak out.
However, the play is making a point about the role of imagination and reality (truth?) and how, in this way, theatre mirrors our concept of “nation”. It’s a clever premise and confidently delivered if a bit slow.
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