If you believe you are a citizen of the world,
then you are a citizen of nowhere.
Every part of me wants to believe that that is a lie.
'Status' is a show about nationality,
specifically about the conversation around national values,
what it means to be from somewhere.
I got really interested because of the way we're talking in Britain at the moment
about how we feel our nationality
and about my own reflexive need to kind of walk away from that conversation
and then I kind of felt that was like something I had a privilege to do.
You know, it's kind of about the white liberal discomfort with
saying you're from somewhere or the idea of borders
and how that isn't really helpful.
And it's not that something snaps
so much as something clicks in the place.
If you believe you are a citizen of the world
then you are a citizen of nowhere.
Well maybe, but better a citizen of nowhere
than a citizen of somewhere that's just shot itself.
I think you absolutely have to tell a story that's going to engage people
and I think the songs are definitely part of that.
You know, they allow you to take a pause
in this quite intense kind of globe-spanning journey
and kind of reflect on where we are
and allow people a different kind of access to the show.
If you draw a straight line on a map of the world,
joining any two points with the minimum fuss,
it doesn't match up with the physical fact that the world is a globe,
because the map is made up.
So when I was writing the show,
I was thinking about how to not do that thing of preaching to people,
and I thought about people who were maybe less engaged
with the things that the show is about or have very different opinions to me,
and I thought about my brother who isn't really a theatre person.
And he thinks about the bloody history of empire
written in these imagined lines upon the earth
and about what his country is doing to itself.
The last spasm of that history trying to assert itself
even as it drains away and becomes desperate.
Well, he will not be desperate.
And part of that is absolutely about
making that difficult conversation accessible to as many people as possible.
It's not a show where I come on stage
and I give you my solution to or opinions about Brexit, for example.
Like to be where I'm from at the moment
you're making this knife out of history
and then you're just stabbing yourself in the fucking face with it.
With this show, we obviously spoke to people who deal professionally with
how nationality works, with the psychology of that
but also we took the opportunity to talk to people globally really
about what their relationship is with their nationality
and that's really informed the show in two ways.
So I spent a lot of time in Germany talking to a huge range of people
from Syrian refugees who had only recently arrived in Germany
to people who lived through that transition from East Germany to West Germany.
I went to a load of places in Britain, like the place where I'm from,
where there isn't that kind of automatic assumption
that we should probably stay in the European Union.
You know, there's a different opinion.
All I'm saying is you can carry your country in a way that is useful
even if the country itself has badly fucked things up.
Not withstanding obviously what's going on at the moment,
the weirdness of someone like me feeling like they can travel the world
picking up other people's experiences
that quite often have been dictated for them
by relationship with the colonial kind of past of my country.
There's something inside you that's poison.
It allows the show to take a really global view
but also to really hone in on what I am trying to do
if I try to avoid taking responsibility for my own sense of belonging
and whether that is the right thing to do or not.
So, he is reaching down his own throat,
forcing his knuckles past his larynx and then he feels it.
The thick, pale worm and as he grasps it, he sees red.
He sees white, he sees blue but mainly it's white,
and then he pulls it up and out of his mouth,
grey, wet and glistening in the lights of the bar
and he says with this awful relief, more mumbles through blood really,
says "But you can't do this to me. I'm British!"