After Seamas Carey interviewed Eden Project founder Tim Smit for his podcast investigating modern Cornish identity, he set the tape aside for six months as he continued gathering interviews. When he returned to it, he realised something: “This is quite hot.”
That still didn’t prepare Carey for what happened when he released episode three of The Reason Why. Smit’s comments – he called the Cornish “tossers” who might be able to speak up for themselves if they “were a bit more fucking articulate” – made national headlines and saw him accused of “‘acceptable’ racism” by local councillors.
“It got the podcast pushed further than I could have with our measly marketing budget,” says Carey, 29, calling from Cornwall. At the time, he was touring a related work-in-progress standup show through village halls and small venues. The day after the Smit backlash, it sold out. “I think people wanted to come because they were angry,” says Carey. “When I heard people talking in the audience, none of them had heard the episode, just that snippet.” Had they heard Smit’s remarks in full, he thinks, they might have agreed with some points. “He’s trying to argue the pros and cons of gentrification. Ironically, I don’t think he articulates his point very well.”
The importance of nuance when discussing Cornwall underpins Carey’s live show, Help! I Think I’m a Nationalist, which was inspired by his experience of making the 10-part, Arts Council-funded podcast. Unlike the many toothless TV series that dwell on Cornwall’s resplendent beaches and only occasionally shrug at its endemic poverty, Carey not only examined second homes and the housing crisis (he’s calling from his sublet a few miles from Falmouth, having been priced out of renting in his home town), he also looked at historic links between tin-mining, slavery and the destruction of indigenous people’s homes. The podcast also explores the experiences of queer people, Muslims and people of colour in Cornwall today, all of which has made it a huge local talking point, with nearly 60,000 listeners to date.
A lifelong artist – puppeteer, composer, piano tuner, choirmaster – Carey started the podcast out of frustration. “Having grown up here, you feel like you know the place and you’re part of the community. Then you realise: which community?” says Carey, who introduces himself in the podcast as a cis, white, heterosexual man. “We bang on about second homes and people not getting involved, but how welcoming is this community that I’m so proud of?” The more people he interviewed, the more questions he had, not least after he interviewed some Cornish nationalists. “I thought, should I be worried? Then I found myself almost wholeheartedly agreeing with them. They’re anti-Brexit, liberal, progressive people who want Cornwall to be a better, welcoming place. Yet, by my uneducated definition, I shouldn’t be agreeing with nationalists, because it’s such a loaded word.”
Help! emerged from those complications. Created by Carey and director Agnieszka Blonska, it’s a one-man show in which Carey plays a reasonable guy who tells the audience it is a “safe space” to talk about Cornish identity. It starts with ribbing about whether you put jam or cream on your scone first, a stereotype locals lovingly perpetuate. Then Carey delivers an increasingly manic four-minute “complete history” of Cornwall while stripping down to pants bearing the St Piran’s Flag, which ends with him screaming “Kernow bys vyken!” (Cornwall forever), berating the audience over whether they would die for Cornwall, and donning a Dryrobe (another signifier of local division) as a cape before falling to the ground.
Carey’s character routinely confesses to his pride in Cornwall. “We thought about what happens when shame and pride are mixed,” he says. “I was looking at the sliding scale of nationalism. On one hand you’ve got Will Coleman” – the local artist behind the acclaimed Man Engine, a 33ft tin miner and the UK’s biggest ever mechanical puppet – “and on the other you’ve got Hitler. We’re all somewhere on the spectrum, and we slide around depending on where we are, whether we’re missing home or whether we’re annoyed by it.”
His Jekyll-and-Hyde character was influenced by Stewart Lee and the late Cornish playwright Nick Darke, “luring people in and making them feel safe, then you flip it on its head and make them see it from the other angle”. He was also inspired by Cornish theatre legend Kneehigh, where his dad was musical director: “Their thing of being naughty, playing with the audience.”
I grew up in Cornwall myself and Kneehigh was the only theatre I’d ever seen as a kid, so I thought that’s just what theatre was – anarchic, spirited – and was disappointed when I realised otherwise. “I have exactly the same problem,” Carey laughs. “Why isn’t there a live band? Why haven’t we got out of our seats, had a bit of nudity and set fire to the set at the end? It’s really annoying when that doesn’t happen!”
Touring Help! locally, Carey was conscious of making the show accessible: “We never used the word ‘theatre’ on the poster because it has a load of baggage.” He also became acutely aware of local difference. Until recently, Carey lived in Camborne, a historic but deprived town. He ended the tour there with a sold-out show and wondered who would turn up. “It was about 2% Camborne; then middle-class arty people from Falmouth. It was a really hard show. None of the jokes landed as they normally would because they felt uncomfortable on someone else’s turf: ‘Are we laughing at the people that should be here?’”
Carey is now taking the show “over the Tamar” for its first English tour, ahead of a likely Edinburgh fringe run this summer. “Our goal was always to make a show talking about something hyperlocal with niche references, so it can work in Madron village hall, but that could also work at Edinburgh because the topics are universal,” he says. He and Blonska are making adaptations and preparing for jokes to misfire. “We’re reshaping it, in that I’m a visitor to England and I’m incredibly proud to tell you about where I’m from.”
The show concludes with the message that “everyone is welcome”. But given hostility towards emmets (tourists) and second home owners, and prejudice experienced by minority groups, are they really? Carey says he understands where this protectiveness comes from. “But if you’re not open, it just carries on this defensiveness, this underlying, simmering tension of nationalism, borders and boundaries; this ‘what is ours and what is yours?’”
Help! led Carey to conclude that he “definitely” wouldn’t call himself a nationalist. He cites local lecturer Denzil Monk calling himself a “culturalist”, a thread he also sees in the work of Bait director Mark Jenkin: “His films are distinct but clearly influenced by a whole wave of cinema from another time.” There’s a stubbornness there that Carey wishes he saw in more Cornish culture, particularly theatre. “There is a lot of crap that gets made here. I think people are scared – a lot of stuff is very safe.” Part of the problem, he says is that there are no local critics covering the scene. “A lack of criticism or any peer review means the work stays in a safe place and doesn’t push boundaries.”
Carey is now working on a new show about modern masculinity, inspired by his experiences running Men Are Singing, a beloved alternative male voice choir. “I want to devise a show where we incorporate all their stories into songs, so the songs are about the men and their feelings,” he says. There won’t, however, be a second series of the podcast. The ultimate success of The Reason Why, says Carey, was in calming him down. “Essentially it was like cheap, Arts Council-funded therapy.”
• Help! I Think I’m a Nationalist is on tour until 22 March
