Marketing blurb:
In 1820 Gregor MacGregor sold a country that didn’t exist. In 2025 Liam Rees can’t stop lying to tourists. Part confessional storytelling. Part TED Talk. Mostly bullshit.
The Land That Never Was tells the true story of Gregor MacGregor (yes that is his real name), a Scottish conman who sold a country that literally did not exist. Blending confessional stand-up, storytelling, and a whole lot of bullshit, this is a story about wanting to burn it all down and start again from scratch. It’s a story about a group of strangers who collectively believed in something that doesn’t exist… yet. It’s is a story about us.
Ends.
The Land That Never Was is a solo show by Liam Rees that tells the story of Gregor MacGregor, a real-life conman who exploited colonial ambitions in Britain by selling a country that literally did not exist. It’s told in a stand-up comedy meets performance lecture format to spark an intimate relationship with the audience, allowing Liam to tackle big questions about colonialism, post-truth, and nation-building from a left-field and funny angle. Throughout the show there are slides that deconstruct the storytelling techniques used to manipulate the audience, forcing them to examine their own biases and susceptibility to manipulation. The show examines the past to look at the present but then imagines what the future might look like. If the country Gregor sold were real, what kind of country would we want to live in and what would it take to make it a reality? Throughout the show, Liam continuously shows the audience why they shouldn’t trust him and asks them to trust him anyway because what other choice do we have?
It was developed whilst Liam was on attachment with Vanishing Point, an international touring theatre company based in Glasgow, and it received dramaturgical development from the National Theatre of Scotland.
In 2024 it previewed at Camden People’s Theatre in London and in Spring 2025 it played at Dublin’s Scene + Heard Festival, the Festival Theatre Studio in Edinburgh, and the Tron Theatre in Glasgow. It is a small scale performance, requiring only a bench, projector and screen or wall to engage with audiences in intimate and larger venues. To date it has played in spaces from 40 up to 155 seats.
