Way back at the start of the Brexit wars, Rufus Norris and Carol Ann Duffy put together a play based on interviews with people – mainly leavers – about their thoughts on the referendum. Topical though it was, My Country: A Work in Progress felt like a vox pop, all shallow thoughts and contradictions, offering lots of noise and little insight. It’s a shame Ivo van Hove’s Re:Creating Europe wasn’t around at the same time because, although it has a similar multi-voice format, its analysis goes deeper.
In a one-off for the Manchester international festival, it is performed script-in-hand by actors from Internationaal Theater Amsterdam with Juliet Stevenson, Christopher Eccleston, Adjoa Andoh, Lemn Sissay and Michael Morpurgo. Their source material ranges from John Donne (“No man is an island”) to Barack Obama (“We are heirs to a struggle for freedom”), supplemented by video footage that embraces everything from a Winston Churchill speech to Jona Lewie’s Stop the Cavalry.
Morpurgo sets the tone with Phoenix of Peace, an introductory broadside in which he declares: “I am not impartial about Europe.” Like the show as a whole, his view is historical, highlighting the conflicts that brought the countries of Europe together in the first place – and what is at stake should ever they pull apart. He is not blind to the shortcomings of the EU, but alarmed by those who forget its history. “It may be a flawed family,” he says. “But it is my family.”
From there, in a production that is as multilingual as the continent itself, we go from Victor Hugo prophesying a Europe no longer at war with itself to Stevenson adopting the tones of Margaret Thatcher to celebrate our common experience: “Our destiny is in Europe.” Laurence Olivier doing the St Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V on film is picked up by Eccleston, then completed in Dutch, as if to underscore our cultural connections even at our most gung-ho.
It’s not a show for Brexiters, but, in admitting to complexity, it creates a richer, more nuanced – if belated – picture of our interdependence than the reductive simplicity of most public debate.
The Guardian is a media partner of Manchester international festival, which runs until 21 July.
