Grayson Perry @ Tyne Theatre, Newcastle (13.10.25)

Are you good? No really, are you? That’s the question Grayson Perry asked the people of Newcastle one brisk Monday evening. This interactive artistic exploration of morality confronted the audience with the most difficult philosophical questions, from, are scatter cushions Tory? to, what gender are dungarees? Seemingly inconsequential concepts, but all of them are geared towards the construction of Grayson’s personal moral code.

While Grayson is a staunch atheist, his fascination with religious iconography provides the structure for his show. Each half considered the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins respectively, using the format to create his own version of the biblical guidelines that assessed whether or not we are fundamentally good or bad people. Both of Perry’s ideological guidelines can ultimately be distilled neatly into, ‘be a nice person,’ and, don’t be boring.’

Grayson Perry’s audience this particular night was the kind of left-leaning, socially aware batch you’d expect. These are the kind of people who enjoy the gender-bending, Turner Prize-winning artist gathered in one room to create an echo chamber in real life, if you will. But since it would be difficult to really get to the bottom of human decency if everyone was just agreeing with each other, Grayson instead took on an interrogative role to challenge the crowd’s preconceptions. After all, if beliefs can’t survive being a little shaken, they’re maybe not as firmly held as you’d previously thought.

While Perry passed non-judgemental judgement on our perceptions of good and bad, a different moral quandary was bubbling in the background: AI. He’s not a stranger to automated artistic processes – if you recall, his Vanity of Small Differences tapestries were digitally drawn and machine-produced. But with almost every point made in his live show, an AI-generated image was displayed. An angel by a red telephone box, a blue-haired, tattooed, heavily pierced ‘Green voter,’ a cat vacuuming. Where does AI sit within Grayson’s personal philosophy? Apparently quite comfortably, however uncomfortably it might sit with some of his audience (myself included). But being good, much like being bad, is subjective… no matter how desperately we try to define it.