My Country; a work in progress: in the words of people across the UK

Description

Britannia calls a meeting, to listen to her people. Caledonia, Cymru, East Midlands, North East, Northern Ireland and the South West bring the voices of their regions. The debate is passionate and opinions divided. Can there ever be a United Kingdom? In the days following the Brexit vote, a team from the National Theatre of Great Britain spoke to people nationwide, aged 9 to 97, to hear their views on the country we call home. In a series of deeply personal interviews, they heard opinions that were honest, emotional, funny, and sometimes extreme. These real testimonials are interwoven with speeches from party leaders of the time in this play by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and director Rufus Norris. My Country opened at the National Theatre, London, in March 2017 before playing at venues around the UK.

Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow and grew up in Stafford. She won the 1993 Whitbread Award for Poetry and the Forward Prize for Best Collection for Mean Time. The World's Wife received the E. M. Forster Award in America, while Rapture won the T. S. Eliot Prize 2005. She is currently Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her most recent volumes are New and Collected Poems for Children (2009) and The Bees (2011), which won the Costa Poetry Award. She is Poet Laureate.

"Carol Ann Duffy brings a major's poet's ear to the music of the text... The uncategorisable brilliance of this show... therapeutically unkinks your brain and lets you hear at the end a more reverberant and ionised silence. It's a political intervention; not a retreat into aesthetics. Roll on the next instalment." - Independent (UK)