On 10 March, The Student sat down with rising playwright Liam Rees, whose play, The Land That Never Was, follows one of the most successful con artists in history. Gregor McGregor convinced Scots to travel to a distant, almost uninhabitable land… ultimately running off with the equivalent of £200 million. His outrageousness is impressive, but McGregor’s story also sheds light on the nature of lying and why we may choose to believe a stranger.
Honor: How would you describe the three stories within The Land That Never Was?
Liam: So the first story is very much about this con man, Gregor McGregor, who, in the 1820s made-up a country and sold it to a bunch of people, who got on a boat to go to this country that did not exist.
The second story is about me, the performer, how I discovered Gregor’s story, and how I worked as a tour guide, lying to tourists to see what they were willing to believe. Edinburgh, I think, is sometimes a bit of a parody of a city, because there’s almost the version that we live in and then the city thatʼs created for tourists. And I noticed this real distinction between what tourists were expecting and real life.
The third story is really about the audience – people that choose to believe in something that may not be true or even exist.
So the whole show is about this interplay between myself and the audience and asking them to decide, what do you believe? Why do you trust me? What are the mental tricks I can play to make you trust me more?
It’s Gregor, myself, and then the audience.
Honor: You first heard about Gregor McGegor during lockdown. What turned your interest in him into the beginnings of a play?
Liam: I heard about Gregor’s story, but [at first] didn’t really know what to do with it. What intrigued me was the idea of: if you could make another country and just go somewhere else, what would you want it to be? In the wake of the Scottish Independence Referendum, Brexit, and Trump, there were these ideas of, “Alright, we can go back to the past. We can make it better, or we can try to go forward, try to make something new.” I find that that tension, that impulse, was really at the heart of it for me.
We’re also living through a time of constant lies, gaslighting and media manipulation. And this guy did it in 1820, and we’re going through it all now. Thereʼs also a narrative in Scotland that we didn’t want anything to do with empire. Gregor’s story really proves that people wanted very enthusiastically to take part in it. They were told they could be emperors of the jungle, and people lapped it up. It wasn’t just the elite, it was everyday people.
It wasn’t until Capital Theatres had a Scratch Night (a night where playwrights can showcase potential projects), where I said I wanted to make this show. They were interested and I thought, “Shit, now I need to write that.” So it was in blind fear I wrote the first 10, 15 minutes of it, and their positive response was the motivation from then.
Honor: And, did you know from the beginning that it would be a stand-up style, and so interactive?
Yes. I had just finished doing a very technically complex show, The Enlightened, in the middle of lockdown. It was done on Zoom with people in India. And that was ridiculous – we were dealing with a five-hour time delay, Zoom issues, censorship, and so I wanted to do something really simple: a solo show with a projector and a slideshow, so simple. But, now that I’m doing it, I’ve felt the urge to do something complex again.
I didn’t train as an actor originally, but after testing early versions of the show, I knew I wanted to explore this comedy and solo format. There’s this sense of trust whenever someone does a solo show about their own personal life. Thereʼs an assumption that everything they tell you is true: if I tell you, “this terrible thing happened to me,” because it’s me, you inherently assume that’s true. It might be totally made up! I was really intrigued by trying to find a form that meant that people were inclined to trust me from the beginning and then how I could then mess with that.
The show uses a lot of the tropes of stand up comedy, but it’s still very much a theatre show influenced by stand up, rather than being stand up moving into theatre.
Honor: Are you expecting a different takeaway from Scottish audiences?
Liam: At the end of the day it’s impossible to pre-empt what an audience is going to get from any show. There are lots of strands to it, so different people take different things from it. If they take something from it, great. If they have had a good time and they maybe think a little bit more afterwards, also great.
I did an early draft of it, a friend of mine came to see, and he’s a person of colour, and he was saying, “Oh, thank God, it’s really refreshing when a white person is actually just going to talk about it”, because I had some comments from Scratch Nights of , “Oh, is it really appropriate for you as a white person to be talking about colonialism?” There’s a culture of fear about saying the wrong thing rather than just trying to do something or acknowledge it [colonialism]. There’s also a weird thing where if one white person talks about it, it breaks the seal for other white people to talk about it. There’s a burden placed on a lot of people of colour who are theatre makers, an expectation that their work is also activism, it should be educational as well as or rather than just being art. So I hope that this is some very small way of being able to push against that.
The play is about questioning: how do you know what you know, and why do you believe what you believe, and how much of your beliefs are actually yours, and how much have they been manipulated by someone else. I can’t tell someone what to think, but I can hopefully encourage them to do the process of thinking for themselves.
On the 14 March, The Student attended his performance at The Studio in Edinburgh, where he kept his word in telling a culturally introspective story about the humour and nature of lying.
Image courtesy of Capital Theatres