REVIEW: The People Vs Democracy, Free World Centre ✭✭✭✭✭

The People Vs Democracy

Free World Centre

5 Stars

The recent national election, with its long-anticipated, but ultimately incorrect, close outcome, has produced more than the usual number of dramatic commentaries; but it would be hard to find one more unusual and ultimately, more grown-up and thought-provoking, than Jamie Harper’s The People versus Democracy, still playing in Clerkenwell for another week. Though some would not regard it as drama at all, for me it offered the most compelling indirect reflection on the current state of our politics of any of the current crop of plays looking at the state of the country. We are used to political plays that exploit the thrills and spills of the climb up the greasy pole, and it is difficult not to view such scenarios with a hard-boiled cynicism born from Yes, Minister and House of Cards, and matured through The Thick of It. So it comes as real and refreshing surprise to confront here not the interplay of political personalities portrayed by actors but rather the process of political negotiation and policy formation performed by us – by the audience as political agents and voters. At the end of the evening we are acutely aware that it is the personal that is political, rather than vice versa, as a result of being made aware of our own direct participation in political actions and their consequences. Rather than being simply bystanders of bizarre shenanigans portrayed by larger-than-life egos we are confronted by the interconnected consequences of our own apparently small-scale contributions. The body politic regains an awareness of its constituent sinews and capillaries in a way that actually served to make all of us present more conscious of how much rides on elections and why it is so important to engage with the process.

Jamie Harper, who devised and (as a senior civil servant) directs the evening, takes seriously the parallels between plays and games theory. There is no fixed script, and no actors in roles rigidly defined by the author. Instead, we the audience, are assigned a job or social status and a set of aspirations in the same way that a character in a drama is given a personality or a set of familial or social relationships. Then we have to work to attain those goals through negotiation, discussion, wheeler-dealing and (in some cases) a degree of wily playing of the system. Everyone starts off with some asset that is needed or desired by others. These assets are given a points value which acts as a currency of negotiation. Some own energy which they can sell; others have land they wish to develop, while another group seeks to build houses, in some case social housing, in other cases unregulated property development. There are sellers of food and disposers of waste – a small-scale modern society, in other words, of ambitious producers, consumers and providers of services. The role of the actors here is to facilitate and energise each of the audience sectors along the way, though every audience member acts independently rather than as a team member. Each round of the game is punctuated by community discussions in which everyone gets together in a miniature parliament to discuss policy decisions (eg building a waste recycling plant or setting tax levels) that impact on citizens in different ways. Those debates are sharpened by two actors playing the role of journalists and presided over by a senior civil servant (Harper). Extra variations include payment of taxes at the end of each round, and a health check to ensure you have spent enough on food (consumption) as much as on money-making and production. Real life physical exercise follows for those who have craftily avoided spending money on looking after themselves. You can also ‘buy’ education to get the skills to take you onto the next level of your goals. The evening could go on indefinitely, but concludes ultimately in a reckoning of who has achieved their original objectives, and how many points they have accrued.

When summarised in this fashion I am conscious that this inter-active game sounds like very worthy hard work rather than entertainment; more an examination to enter the Civil Service rather than an evening at the theatre. This impression would, however, be incorrect. Instead, all of us participating found it an enriching and mind-stretching experience that was actually in the best traditions of the theatre. By being thrown together into the melee of individual decision-making in a group context we recovered the complexity of natural political debate that was so woefully lacking in Question Time and other pre-election forums of discussion. The essence of the play and of the audience’s engagement with the subject lay in the impromptu discussions and conversations that grew up between all the participants as we tried to achieve our goals in the market place. The level and quality of the ruminations in the mini-parliament was high and far better informed than it would have been if we had sat down in a studio to discuss funding choices and the allocation of scarce resources in the abstract. The format thus gave a wonderfully adult embodiment of the interconnectedness of social choice – of how a decision in one area will have many indirect ramifications for other groups that are not immediately obvious. So much of political discussion at election time is about the attainment of individual objectives that it was salutary to be reminded of how those can often only be achieved within a community setting, and are usually better delivered with a thorough awareness of the impact of our actions on others.

On the evening I attended the subjects that arose spontaneously included how much state intervention there should be to resolve market blockages, the advantages and disadvantage of privatization, especially in education, rates of tax, salary levels for civil servants (we gave them a pay cut!), and the balance between social housing and mansions (we let the market decide that one). The best entrepreneurial solution came from a group of overeducated and unemployed people who raised sufficient funding and land to set themselves up as a commune, which we all agreed was a very crafty and ideologically pure way of riding out the perils of austerity….. More seriously I think we all came away with a better sense of the sheer difficulty of political policy making when it is largely a matter of the allocation of scarce resources between competing, equally valid goods. Political philosophers as well as partisan politicians continue to wrestle with that conundrum and we came to no new startling conclusions either save for the recognition that markets are necessary and inevitable but need to be tempered by constant reminders that we should seek a wider range of sympathies beyond our own immediate selfish goals – and that in fact we may actually achieve more of our own targets through such an enlarged imaginative engagement. Interests and empathies can co-exist, as the real (as opposed to demonic) Adam Smith said long ago.

And in case you wonder how I did,… well, your reviewer started the evening as a miner selling energy units, purchased the education needed to design social housing and ended up running an empire of social housing units, combining ideological purity and considerable wealth. Perhaps I missed my vocation? All credit to Jamie Harper and his ebullient, energetic team for a superb evening of thought-provoking fun. Do catch it while it is still running so as to give yourself a bit more faith in the possibilities of the political process, whatever you may feel about the level of debate in real life.

The People Vs Democracy runs until May 22.