My Country: A Work in Progress (NT/Warwick Arts Centre, 25 May)

So my work visa was away being renewed while I watched this, which is not something I would particularly recommend. And I guess I have to hand it to the NT: this is the sort of thing they should be doing, even if I thought it was kind of a failure. The form of the thing would have been recognizable to the Victorians, if not to the Phoenicians: personified representatives of the regions of Britain assemble to talk about Brexit, their reasons for and against it, and--most of the time--their grumbles about life. The poetry bits were rubbish--"the sacrament of listening" remains with me, even as other bits of language have drifted away. But the grumbles: the most powerful of these came early, when a voice from somewhere northern describes the inequity of schooling in their district. This has nothing to do with Brexit but, I think, everything to do with it: these seem to have been the chickens that came home to roost, in the general vague protest that the election engendered.

With that said, as a foreigner (subset: the good type, employer-sponsored visa), I spent the whole thing feeling confused and anxious and--increasingly--furious that no-one from my sub-subset of recent economic migrants was included. The points of similitude, between the regions: shitty food. Heavy drink. Terrible pop music from the 1970s. An Austerity of the mind, it seemed to me. I'm not entirely sure if this is a complaint or not--I don't know if the voices of those fresh off the vehicle of conveyance, as indeed I am, should have a say in things. But I left this chamber of horrors feeling like I did after Brexit: that the cosmopolitan place I thought I had landed in turned out to be parochial AF, as I believe the kids say.

Do echo chambers like what this play depicts even exist anymore, I wonder? This play's voices came from a closed loop, talking to itself; but does anyone, in this international age, spend much of their time in such a loop? I did not feel a part of these conversations, their occasional git-on-git gooniness. But that's the point, right? Genuine props to the NT for making me feel so rootless and heartsick.