The latest show from fringe favourites YESYESNONO – aka the de facto solo project of Sam Ward – certainly has a grimly topical headwind behind it thanks to the xenophobic far right riots that have broken out across the UK in recent days.
Not that the timeliness of a piece of fringe theatre is the main issue when it comes to civil unrest, of course, but for what it’s worth I’m not sure the currentness of ‘Nation’ is entirely helpful to a work that relies on alluring ambiguities rather than out and out polemic (except for the bit where it does).
Standing alone in the centre of the room, Ward describes a small community to us, casting audience members in the roles of town grandees: the butcher, the baker… and a much loved local woman whose retirement party would appear to trigger a bizarre local apocalypse. After reluctantly inviting a stranger who turns up in the night to take a room in her house, bits of the town start to disappear – at first minor small objects; eventually roofs, houses and whole streets. The people of the town blame the stranger who has moved in with the woman.
There’s a haunting, Lynchian quality to Ward’s storytelling, a sense this isn’t going to be an easy one to decipher. That is until a late twist seems to firmly set it down the path of ‘the stranger represents migrants, the villagers represent intolerant locals, we ignore the widfer world at our peril’.
Which is fair enough but it both jars with the hitherto ambiguous tone and also invites you to start looking for more literal meaning throughout, which I’m not convinced works. (Again, I don’t think it helps in terms of approaching this with an open mind that the country has been consumed by xenophobic rioting.)
When ‘Nation’ resumes its previously enigmatic tone after dicing with polemic it feels somewhat blunted, like we’ve been told what it was about already so why keep up this pretence of being cryptic. Intriguing and singular, but it trips over itself.