'Labour is just a party for university graduates now'

As he prepares for his one-man show about identity in London tomorrow night, Grayson Perry tells Nancy Durrant about car-crash politics, the British Museum, why activist contemporary art doesn’t work, and going for the laugh

- Nancy Durrant

LET us be clear. Grayson Perry does not do stand-up. “I did this lecture at the Southbank and Sandi Toksvig said to me, ‘you should do stand-up’. I don’t call it stand-up though. I’m not one of these people that stands over the mic and tries to get a laugh every 15 seconds,” he tells me, seated in his Islington studio, a tatty desk and a couple of steaming mugs of instant coffee between us. “I do go for the laughs though. Definitely.”

The laughs, if his conversation is anything to go by, are plenty in his latest project, his fourth touring one-man show, which lands at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London tomorrow. Grayson Perry: A Show All About You sounds like it’s part-musical comedy, part-TED talk, part-Twitter-baiting nightmare.

“It’s got songs. It’s got audience interaction. I make them download an app so they can vote on things and send word clouds onto a screen. And it’s about identity, which is a topic that nobody seems to think about these days,” he says. And laughs.

Audiences have been appreciative — “I got a standing ovation in Aberdeen” — despite being the butt of the joke. “I tease the audience,” he says. “I’ve polled them on previous tours, so I know exactly who they are: they’re the well-educated Left-leaning middle classes, as you would expect. So I make them suffer for that.”

The show explores the different facets of our social identity — class and income, how you vote, gender. “And I do a bit of autobiographical stuff, as a kind of case study, using what they call lived experience, which means you can get away with any old shit.”