Written and performed by Seamas Carey

Directed by Agnieszka Blonska

Review by Marina Funcasta

Unreliable narrators, and the narratives they weave, are becoming more and more popular at the Fringe. They force audiences to question the impression garnered of the character, the setting, and, quite crucially in some cases, the entire plot. In this way, they are often used by companies or individuals as political tools, prodding audience members to question the authority given to story-tellers, and prompting them to discern the narrative for themselves. 

In ’Help! I think I’m a Nationalist, the unreliable narrator is utilised to the utmost effect. Seamus Carey, writer and actor and self-proclaimed lover of nuance (and Cornwall), performs a one-man show which mutates so rapidly from reason to hysteria that it would seem a Cornish version of Jekyll and Hyde. To be sure, transforming, both physically and vocally, from a Jekyll-like patriotic figure who is proud of his culture and history, into a primitive and tribalistic Hyde, so attached to his national identity that he is prepared to eat “his” soil and scream out the Cornish anthem, is unsettling. A truly disarming unreliable narrator, it would seem, is able to lose the audience’s trust, and then subsequently rebuild it again, only to then sardonically break it with even more fervour and violence, directed with escalating aggression by Agnieszka Blonska. 

Many political conclusions can be drawn from Carey’s play: a metaphor for fake news, or a study on the rationale of toxic nationalists’ minds, the nervous laughter which fills the audience can only be understood as something reminiscent of Pinter. At once unnerving and fascinating, audience members become aware of themselves in this play in the sense that we are forced to question how far the common ground between our own opinions, and those of a Cornish nationalist, is able to stretch.