When you see Fight Night’s provocative interactive experiment, it will immediately seem like a metaphor for the duke-’em-up being waged between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

After all, characters vie for your votes all evening, audience members elect and eliminate them in live keyboard elections, and the action takes place in a boxing-ring-like setting.

But Angelo Tijssens, of the innovative Belgian troupe Ontroerend Goed, reveals that the show has its roots in his country’s own colossal electoral shit show. He’s referring to 2010-11, when the election went south, 11 fragmented minority parties were elected to power, and the nation found itself spending 546 days without a government while those parties tried to work out a coalition. That’s a world record, outdoing Iraq and Cambodia in the same decade.

“But everything went on, like our schools and hospitals and jobs,” recalls Tijssens, speaking to the Straight over the phone from his home in Antwerp, where he says people are as glued to the American TV debates as we are in Canada. “We had a complete political impasse, but things were quite all right.”

That got the company’s artistic director, Alexander Devriendt, questioning the responsibilities of candidates and voters. (In Belgium you’re required by law to fill out a ballot.) “If you have a small responsibility to cast your vote as part of the electorate, does that finish when you walk out of the voting booth?” Tijssens asks.

What Devriendt built was a kind of theatrical experiment to explore the way voting works and make us look at our biases. In Fight Night, an MC guides the audience through rounds of voting, asking them which character traits they prefer (the show is stripped of political platforms), and letting the actors state their case. Audience members’ votes eliminate them one by one, until a single person is left in power.

The beauty of the show, of course, is that it will feel timely and familiar to almost any country the troupe takes it to, Tijssens reports.

“What makes you vote for someone? Is it the way they dress? Do they talk to you because you’re male or female or rich or poor?” he asks. “All the rules that exist in the real world, we try to evoke in those four walls. We really make, like, a miniature state within the hour and a half of this show. We create the system, and within that the audience has a big role.”

The title and boxing-ring setup came naturally, of course, given the kind of combat that goes on in elections around the world—and that was fully on view in one of the nastiest TV debates in U.S. history. Performers arrive in hooded robes, take part in rounds, and use a pull-down, ring-style microphone to gain your attention and sympathy.

At first, the theatre company thought it would stage each round with actual boxing gloves. “As someone who’s performed the show more than 150 times, I’m glad they got that wrong,” Tijssens says with a laugh.

He adds that the battle of words still feels very much like a boxing match—as does the political realm, with its fight-night semantics: attacking, defending, winning, losing, and beating.

“It’s basically where we come from: people fight to gain power, only the tribes have become bigger and the warfare has become more civilized,” says the performer.

To create the show, Tijssens says the company first spent months studying the electoral process, then four or five months building a structure. An audience and interactive voting technology were brought in early on, to see how different effects would work on real people. “The whole voting process became the seventh actor in the show,” Tijssens explains.

The resulting experience, despite the appearance of a free vote, forces us to examine the way the democratic process may actually destroy choice. It poses uncomfortable questions, especially with what is at stake just south of our border right now.

But Tijssens, who thoroughly enjoys performing the kind of show that changes every night (“We never know who’s going to be left standing on the stage”), remains optimistic about the system that Fight Night dissects with such gusto.

“Being cynical about it—that’s stupid and dangerous,” he says. “In several countries around the world people are actually dying right now for democracy. But we also should not be blind. There are also a lot of flaws in this system and we’ve been working a long time to make it better. It’s still the best of the worst systems, to misquote Winston Churchill. It’s something you still need to have fights over every day.”

Fight Night is at the Cultch’s Historic Theatre from Tuesday (October 18) to October 29.