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As part of our Edinburgh Fringe coverage, Playbill is seeing a whole lotta shows—and we're sharing which ones you absolutely must see if you're only at the Fringe for a short amount of time. Consider these Playbill Picks a friendly, opinionated guide as you try to choose a show at the festival.
A new solo show from Cornish artist and podcast host Seamas Carey is fixated on an incendiary topic, one so dangerous and tricky that Carey can scarcely even say it out loud during the show for fear of being cancelled. That topic: nationalism.
Carey has taken conversations about the Cornish nationalism movement from his podcast The Reason Why and turned it into a new show. The result, Help! I Think I'm a Nationalist, is at turns enlightening, thrilling—and disturbing.
If you're reading from the U.S., you may, like me, know little if anything about Cornish nationalism. And that's OK. Carey will educate you during the show about not only the general viewpoints of the movement, but the history of Cornwall that led to it as well.
More importantly, Help! I Think I'm a Nationalist is ultimately less about Cornish politics than it is the dangerous ideas and behavior lurking beneath the surface for any socio-political movement. Carey uses his unique show to challenge audiences to engage with how seemingly benign passion for almost anything can take a turn—and why it's so difficult to talk about. Carey isn't afraid to make audiences uncomfortable. That's actually the whole point.
Cornwall, as we learn, was once an independent and self-led nation that existed peacefully alongside the British monarchy. Then relations soured and the crown took control, slaughtering many of its residents in the process. Only more recently has the "ceremonial county" achieved some political separation from England, kind of like Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. The Cornish nationalist movement wants more, to be fully autonomous and distinct from the rest of the U.K.
Of course, any movement including the word "nationalist" comes with baggage. Most people hear the word and think of Adolf Hitler or white supremacists. But is pride in your homeland automatically such a bad thing? After all, is the story of Cornwall not its own example of British colonialism, even though it often gets left out of that narrative?
That's the kind of nuance Carey insists on repeatedly injecting into the conversation. Help! I Think I'm a Nationalist is a show diametrically opposed to black-white, good-bad discourse, refreshing to see in today's social media climate. Less a solo show than a led conversation between performer and audience, Carey uses his work to probe and challenge his audience's takes on everything. It's easy to say you oppose Nazis, but what about when nationalism means taking pride in the community where you grew up, where generations of your ancestors made their homes too?
But injecting that nuance actually isn't the most brilliant part of Carey's work. It's his skill at showing how understandable feelings can become far more sinister in a flash.
In Carey's hands, a topic as benign as whether to pour your jam or cream onto your scone first in a Cornish cream tea can become a tool of oppression—a friendly debate can quickly devolve into a violent screaming match or worse. A dislike of tourists clogging up the streets and sidewalks when you're just trying to get home or to work (more than familiar to any New Yorker) can spiral into dangerous and bigoted hate.
"I'm sorry, I think I went a little bit too far," Carey says each time he lets himself play out the worst outcomes of these scenarios, always to terrifying and uncomfortable effect.
Exploring that connection, that pathway to extremism, feels novel, timely, and uniquely theatrical. Carey isn't just delivering a monologue that could be a podcast episode or a YouTube video. Help! I Think I'm a Nationalist hinges on his live connection to the audience, and to the audience's willingness to join him on a difficult journey interrogating their own beliefs, their own behavior. Carey is so charming, passionate, and smart that you want to follow him even down the thorniest paths.
At one point, he polls the audience on how long they've been in Scotland, eventually finding the "real" Scots that have been in town for longer than the Fringe Festival. But are their parents from Scotland? Grandparents? Great great grandparents? Who gets to claim being a countryman, those with deep ancestral ties or anyone who's made their life there? It was fascinating to watch the audience reaction go from bemused pleasure to quiet indignance and uncertainty as Carey's inquisition got more complex, a pattern that plays out several times during the performance.
There is no shortage of discourse in the world lamenting our lack of nuance in debates over any number of hot-point issues. Carey goes a step further to show us the result of that lack of nuance. As he so deftly points out, polarization transforms legitimate feelings and reactions into hatred and violence, which ironically makes those feelings and reactions near impossible for anyone else to hear and understand.
Help! I Think I'm a Nationalist is an experience that keeps you on your toes, turning on a dime from being funny and informative to uncomfortable and terrifying. Carey has created a show so shocking and thought provoking that he was inspired to publish a book of further reading, six short essays from other writers with a full gamut of takes on the show's subject (it's available for £7 in the theatre's gift shop). Carey knows he's created a show that is itself incendiary, and is responsibly giving audiences the tools to continue its conversations after he's taken his bow.
And though he borrows some talking points from the worst of the nationalist movement, Carey makes clear that understanding where bigotry and hatred comes from is in no way excusing those feelings. When you enter the venue, a screen on stage proclaims, "Everyone is welcome here."
Of course, Carey doesn't come with solutions to any of these problems, be they the Cornish nationalist movement or the tribal, take-sides discourse that comes with the loss of nuance. If anyone had a solution to share, we might not be in this mess.
But, Help! I Think I'm a Nationalist isn't about proposing solutions. It's about how solutions will never be found until we challenge ourselves to open our eyes and have the whole conversation.
Help! I Think I'm a Nationalist is running at Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh's The Lyceum Studio through August 27. For tickets, click here.
