ABSTRACT
My Country: A Work in Progress was developed by the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain as an immediate response to the result of the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. Partly verbatim drama, My Country interweaved ‘testimonies of people of Britain’ and statements made by some of the key players of the referendum campaigns with the writing of poet Carol Ann Duffy in an attempt at making sense of the social, political, and cultural divisions that the Brexit vote exposed in an indelible manner. In the theatre’s website, the play was described as ‘debate’, but the work was met with lukewarm – and at times, negative – reception by audiences and critics; the consensus seemed to be that although the work was theatrically uninspired and politically insufficient, it did demonstrate a desire for the theatre to do something.
In this short chapter, I consider what that something might be, particularly in the context of the referendum. I focus on the limitations of the work, proposing that My Country theatrically corresponds to the referendum, which I read as populist theatre for a ‘post-political’ age, ostensibly a form of ‘sounding’ the will of the people – yet, in fact, silencing any real opportunity for debate and disagreement.
