Flying in Circles: What happens when the Left Wing tries to understand the Right Wing?

London has two plays running this week that both seek to empathise with Right wing ideology.
A surprising idea but not a surprising subject matter, you can't move for news about immigration, the hot topic since the success of UKIP has encouraged all of the major parties to swing to the Right in a desperate scramble for votes. Both plays contained a similar pretext, that the gulf between the left wing and right wing has become so vast, we have reached a point at which instead of dismissing other people who have different ideas to our own, the only way to move forward is try and empathise.

This was explored literally by Chris Thorpe in Confirmation, a documentary style play, based on Thorpe's attempts to challenge his own Liberal Confirmation bias by seeking to get to know a Right Wing Activist. In order to really test himself, Thorpe chooses a man, who is not only anti immigration and the EU and arguably by definition a racist, he also denies the Holocaust and Climate change as well. Thorpe is an intense actor, as we enter the room he feels pumped, like the guy at the bar you subconsiously make sure that you don't sit next to. So he enables his protagonist and his imaginary interactions with him with a terrifying fervour. Despite a little bit of audience game play, this is serious stuff, the audience feels like they have been dumped at the end of a rather aggressive, political phlegm fuelled roller coaster ride by the end.

Albion employs more comfortable means to take their audience on a right wing journey (and I am presuming here that for most of the audience this is a journey and not their home). Using karaoke, to voice the  characters motivations makes for an enjoyable if sometimes unnecessary addition to Chris Thompson's story of an array of right wing characters. The characters motivations for turning to right wing  politics are explained from the inside, we are encouraged to see them as fully rounded individuals and thus empathis with those with opposing views to our own. In this regards, Albion is arguably the more successful of the two plays, for Confirmation did nothing to dissuade Thorpe nor the audience. Albion, whilst being the least sophisticated, or imaginative theatrically ventured of the two plays managed to present a more nuanced and varied version of the issues, which got it's liberal audience some way further to confronting their own confirmation bias.