Book extract: Do It Yourself: Making Political Theatre

Evie Manning and Rhiannon White

DIY – don’t wait for permission

Go ahead. Do it anyway. Common/Wealth arose from our sense that the work couldn’t wait. What that meant is that we didn’t care about the theatre industry, how to enter it or how to become recognised.

We don’t wait for permission. We find networks of people who want to make, create, act and live differently. When we started the company, the people we found and the people who found us had learned how to clean up empty, derelict sites and transform them into performance spaces. We knew people who could build electricity rigs from lamp posts, who could rewire, who could create beautiful, intricate sets out of cardboard, who knew how to make places safe, and had time to imagine and build things from nothing.

We made theatre in the spaces we found and with whatever we had to hand. We still carry that ethos. It’s not about money or buildings. It’s about the way we are with people and spaces.

Don’t wait for permission. You don’t need a studio or a theatre to make work. Use your living room, the church hall, the community centre, the street, the park. Get a group of mates together and know that you are the most important resource. One of you will know how to hook up a projector, another how to get the sound system working. One of you will be stronger with music choices, another with text, another with visuals. Get talking, have the idea, build it together.

Decline

The theatre industry in the UK at the time of writing is in a steep decline. Theatre buildings and programmers are risk averse, recycling the classics to put bums on seats, and new work isn’t getting championed. It feels even more important to make work on the edges, to do it differently. Use your tools and anything and everything you have to hand to get the work out there. The idea is the most important thing and we need new ideas more than ever.

Build it and they will come. Once you’ve got the show together, flyer the neighbours, your friends, the shops. Don’t have money for a sound system or to print flyers? Beg, steal, borrow. Put a call out, use your networks, do it through socials. Don’t be afraid for things to look hand-drawn or hand-made. That’s your aesthetic right now and it’s beautiful. Also, don’t lose it, even when you get money or funding. Continue being resourceful – keep thinking of what you can borrow, steal and recycle.

Responding to the here and now

Making theatre is our way of responding to the world in the here and now. It’s our way of helping ourselves and other people feel equipped to face the challenges of living in an increasingly unstable world. Decisions are made at levels that are unreachable. Algorithms create unrest and division. The elites are scared of us, in our multitudes, in our commonality and differences, and dedicate effort to making sure we are fighting among ourselves. It’s easy to feel apathy and despair. We love people, we believe in people, and see our power and potential every day. We also see and experience how complicated and knotty people are. As are the challenges we face.

Idealism and anger in equal measure fuel us a lot of the time. But we don’t sit still. We always want to respond, react, and we try to do so quickly, with the shifting political ground – whether that’s staging a reading of the Gaza Monologues, mobilising our networks in the face of unimaginable genocide in Palestine, creating a car-meet in response to ‘Punish a Muslim Day’ (Radical Acts), putting on self-defence classes when there is fear of far-right extremism (Speakers Corner), or making a show about the British arms trade (I Have Met the Enemy). We don’t go quietly into the night (see ‘Works’ for more on these shows and initiatives).

We think of art and culture as a necessity and as a right. Our work is honest and real, emotional and personal. It brings the here and now into reach. It makes change feel possible.

Making political theatre

‘Political’, in its simplest form, means power – and there’s power in voice, in being heard, in telling your own story, taking focus and paying attention to people and places that are ignored. We get people who have not had access to political platforms or decision-making forums into positions of power in our performances. But we hate it when people talk about ‘the voiceless’. Everyone has a voice – they just need to be listened to. Making political theatre is an open-ended process. You pay attention, respond, create something, send it out, create ripples; people respond, the ripples keep growing and narratives keep changing, and bit by bit we’re part of a collective process of change.

Theatre can provide a platform for what’s not getting spoken about and feels dangerous to say in public spaces. You can get away with saying a lot in theatre, and it can be a rallying space. We’re living in times characterised by ignoring and forgetting, and we believe that theatre has a role in paying attention to the world we live in now. It’s as simple as that. We believe all theatre is political. Every choice in theatre is a choice between paying attention or perpetuating our traditions of ignoring, forgetting and looking away.

Because our work is political, people’s experiences are at the centre. As we’ve said, we started the company partly as a reaction against a middle class art world that didn’t reflect the people we know. But we’re never trying to show the broken bits of people and places because it’s more dramatic that way. We work with people’s actual experiences, their complexities, and bring them into a creative process where they imagine, experiment, make it up, try things out. Ending up with something that celebrates and enhances the wealth of the common, and that also allows people to share safely, have new experiences, enjoy themselves and connect across differences.

Do It Yourself: Making Political Theatre by Evie Manning and Rhiannon White is published by Manchester University Press.