Review: The Majority (National Theatre)

Inside The Majority, a meandering 90-minute monologue from the Scottish playwright and performer Rob Drummond, there is a much more interesting play struggling to get out. That may be a minority view, but it’s one I’m sticking to.

Drummond is a man who has made his name in works such as Bullet Catch and In Fidelity, carefully crafted audience encounters that amiably but sharply examine the vagaries of existence. He is undoubtedly someone you want to spend time with and this new piece has a cracking premise: with the help of electronic voting devices, Drummond will conduct affairs according to the wishes of the majority of his audience.

Just as in the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 and the Brexit vote of 2016 a simple yes or no will determine the course of events.

It starts off interestingly enough. On an adapted version of the Mosquitoes set (design Jemima Robinson) – which is disconcertingly like every TV game show you have ever seen – we vote to reveal who we are: overwhelmingly liberal (90 per cent), white (91 per cent) and pro-Remain (92 per cent). We believe we can make a difference and have a rebel streak. We’ll let latecomers in, even though Drummond tells us he hates them.

But then Drummond begins to tell us about the real meat of the show: his encounter, in Edinburgh the day after the independence vote, with Eric, a bonkers beekeeper who sees neo-Nazi conspiracies at every turn. Drummond, who has not voted in the independence referendum, admires him his certainty and sets out on an unlikely odyssey to find him in a rundown fishing village in the Highlands. Eric’s influence leads him to violent encounters with those opposing the arrival of Syrian refugees in Scottish towns – and ultimately to a revelation.

Interspersed with this not always engrossing story are further votes on utilitarian propositions about whether we would kill one to save many, and conversations with Drummond’s Tory-voting mother who makes the wise observation that "the feeling of being right is the same as the feeling of being wrong."

My problem with the show is that I was a lot less interested in Eric than in the exploration of majority voting; I’d have liked time to examine some of the audience’s votes which were not quite as consistent as you might expect. (A surprising number were ready to slay one to save five, though the vote changed once it was their child who would die.) I wasn’t in truth very taken with Eric, mainly because I didn’t believe that anyone would adopt him as a role model.

And much though I liked Drummond, and like his shambling, genial presence, I didn’t feel that the conclusion he reached – basically a plea for tolerance and listening more – offered much of an answer to a country that is so divided by its beliefs. Maybe with a more mixed audience, the show would have packed a bigger punch. As it is, it’s an interesting curiosity.

The Majority runs at the Dorfman, National Theatre until 28 August.