The Majority is a provocative one man show originally produced at the Arches Theatre in Glasgow. Writer performer Rob Drummond was approached to create a piece on the Scottish Independence referendum. As a pessimist he was disinterested in politics and struggled to find a human interest angle until he met a man who was selling his vote on e-bay.Digging deeper into the background of this he was inspired to examine the way votes influence outcome and as you enter the theatre you're handed a key pad with which you can vote for the direction the play will take at various cross-roads in the story and in answer to some moral dilemmas.
The National's small Dorfman theatre has been configured so the audience sit on four sides of a slick looking set reminiscent of a hi-tech TV game show, including a panelled floor that lights up to show how much voting time is left. Designer Jemima Robinson and composer Scott Twynholm must have had a lot of fun replicating the presentation of programmes like Who wants to be a Millionaire.
Drummond himself is at odds with the decor and almost the exact opposite of a slick game show host. He exudes "ordinary-Scottish-bloke" and he's very easy to like.
We have some fun to begin with, voting on whether latecomers are to be admitted. We were asked to vote yes by pressing one on our key pads or no by pressing two. The vote tonight was that they should be allowed in and as this wasn't Drummond preference he embarrassed them by making them walk across the stage - so if you're going, don't be late!
Then there's a few votes to establish what we already know or can easily see. We're mostly white liberals, pretty much equally divided between male and female.
The rest of the evening consists of the performer recounting a series of encounters he has had, or might have had, with a (probably) delusional bee-keeping activist in the highlands. I'm really not clear if it's a true story or not. There's a bit of flirting with the "it's only theatre - or is it?" question. Have we really voted to abuse a someone on social media and watched it happen? Or is it an act? I think the uncertainty is supposed to evoke a frisson of danger but I found the confusion left me ambivalent.
Sometimes we're asked to vote on how the show progresses but usually it's just parlour game stuff in the same vein as "who would you throw from a hot air ballon basket to save the other passengers".
If this all sounds a bit like something you could see any night of the week on TV whenever a public vote decides the outcome, it is. So should you spend your money seeing this show rather than anything else this week? Or opt to stay at home watching channel 5?
Well, it's well staged, the performer is engaging and the keypads are fun, it's never boring but I'm not convinced it adds up to much more than that. Irritatingly the final dilemma we're asked to vote on doesn't differentiate between verbal and violent protest, lumping them together when they are two very different things.
After an hour and a half Drummond invites you to debate with him in the foyer, holding himself up as a shining example of someone who's learnt to listen to the opposite point of view. I love a lively political debate but I'm never asked to intervene in transport calamity dilemmas of the type the show asks us to consider, so I wasn't quite sure what he hoped to discuss.
Personally I'd rather have seen a really good drama about Scottish independence or the pitfalls of democracy. The Majority doesn't really succeed in exploring either subject.
Jules (Will Merrick), a marine biologist with an unlucky family history, places a personals ad offering "sex to change the course of the world". He's about to be joined at his underground lab by Jo (Nicole Sawyerr), whose expectations of a wild night of no strings sex, are understandably running high. Little does she realise the potential evolutionary significance this meeting could have for the species.