Camden People's Theatre Presents COMMON PEOPLE
By: Stephi Wild Jan. 29, 2018
Camden People's Theatre are breaking out the c-word with a new fortnight-long festival of works that asks questions about class. In August 2017, a Labour party report criticised working-class under-representation in the arts, and demanded the cultural sector work harder to fill the "class-shaped hole" in their audience and workforce.
Is working-class 'cool' again? Or is that a smokescreen for never-ending austerity: the most sustained attack on people with low incomes in living memory? Is there 'a class-shaped hole' in the diversity debate - and what can we do to plug it? Who gets to tell working-class stories, and who gets to watch them?
Headlining the festival is award-winning poet and theatre-maker Jackie Hagan's This Is Not a Safe Space, a solo show examining the harsh effects of benefit cuts on those on the margins of society with emphasis on class, disabilities and mental illness. Drawing on first-person interviews with over 80 people and using DIY Puppetry, poetry and standup comedy, Jackie Hagan brings their stories to the stage. Far from sob stories, these testimonies reveal fully rounded lives full of spikey humour.
Rebecca Atkinson-Lord will be back at CPT with The Class Project, a show about belonging, 'making good' and remembering your own voice. Other highlights include Libby Liburd, who follows her show Muvvahood with Temporary to explore the rise in temporary accommodation, and Scottee invites audiences to a Working Class Dinner Party to tuck into a takeaway and chew over ideas of working class identity.
Plus, a panel of experts including the sociologist Sam Friedman discuss the persistence - or resurgence - of class inequality in the arts, ask what can be done about it and propose some radical solutions.
Artistic director Brian Logan says, "We're all talking more and more about class, apparently. But who's leading the conversation? Who's dictating what we're allowed to say? Our new Common People festival is proudly led by working-class artists and working-class voices, taking apart the idea that working-class is cool again, exploring the reality of being working-class in modern Britain - and in its theatre. First and foremost a 'people's theatre', CPT is committed to class diversity on its stage, behind the scenes and in its audience, and we can't wait to be galvanised, inspired - and entertained - by the stories these extraordinary artists are coming here to tell."
Camden People's Theatre
58 - 60 Hampstead Road
London, NW1 2PY
17 - 28 April
08444 77 1000 | www.cptheatre.co.uk
This Is Not A Safe Space
Tue 17 - Sat 21 April, 7.15pm
Jackie Hagan
Benefit cuts are hitting disabled people the hardest. Half of people in poverty are disabled or live with a disabled person. The future looks grim, so how can we get people to sit up, listen and care and not keel over with empathy-fatigue?
Award-winning poet and theatre maker Jackie Hagan's way has been to make a new solo show that features the real voices of proper skint disabled people she knows. Jackie has conducted interviews with people from all over the country living on the fringes and the spaces in between. They are not sob stories, they are fully rounded lives full of the spiky humour and the complicated weirdness of being human. Jackie weaves these narratives together with poetry and anecdotes, celebrating the weird, the wonky, the unruly, and the resilient.
Expect audience interaction, DIY puppetry, poetic comedy, comedic poetry, and one underclass amputee steering the show.
"A perfect antidote to programs like Benefits Street." - Disability Arts Online
£12/10 (conc.)
Please Hold
Tue 17 Apr, 9pm
Please Hold Project
Many of us face punishing experiences through the guise of help, in the form of state bureaucracy. Please Hold is about naming this and sharing our experiences.
Please Hold Project are a theatre collective who use spoken word, songs and movement to explore experiences of violence at the hands of the British state and how, together, we can survive them.
£8 (work-in-progress)
Temporary
Wed 18 & Thu 19 Apr, 9pm
Libby Liburd
What does it mean to be housed in temporary accommodation? How do you end up there? And once you're there, how 'temporary' is it really?
From the maker of the critically acclaimed Muvvahood, Temporary explores the social and political reasons for the surge in households in temporary accommodation, why women (single mothers especially) are particularly at risk of 'social cleansing' in London and the emotional effects for women and children in temporary accommodation.
£12/10 (conc.)
The Class Project
Fri 20 & Sat 21 Apr, 9pm
Rebecca Atkinson-Lord
This is a show about belonging. About tribes and families. About the place you belong because you were born there; the places that are in your blood but also the places you adopt; that you pretend are your home and the places you change yourself to try and belong in.
It's about class mobility. And regional identity. And being a Thatcher's child. It's about education and 'making good' for yourself. And maybe about how that can leave you exiled from the place you started. With nowhere to quite belong.
It's about always being an imposter and trying to remember how to speak in your own voice. I've been thinking about it for a life time.
£12/10 (conc.)
Rebel Choir
Sat 21 Apr, 6pm
Rebecca W Morris
The Rebel Choir is a London-grown memberless choir, open to all, regardless of ability. Rebel Choir sings songs of resistance, hope and change from all around the world and throughout history. Join The Rebel Choir at this workshop and help create our own songs of class, identity and causes close to our hearts.
Pay What You Can
Big Bang
Tue 24 Apr, 7.30pm
Various artists
Our regular night of works-in-progress returns for a Common People special editions, exploring the themes of the festival.
£12/10 (conc.)
TALK: Is there a class-shaped hole in the diversity debate?
Wed 25 April, 7pm
Various
In 2017, a Labour party report criticised working-class under-representation in the arts, and demanded the cultural sector work harder to fill the "class-shaped hole" in their audience and workforce.
Tonight, a panel of experts including the sociologist Sam Friedman (author of The Class Ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged) discuss the persistence - or resurgence - of class inequality in the arts, asks what can be done about it, and proposes some radical solutions.
Pay What You Can
Opal Fruits
Wed 25 April, 9pm
Holly Beasley-Garrigan
An unreliable solo show about the fetishisation of the feral female - about working class women and the trouble with 90's nostalgia. Opal Fruits hinges on a turning point in 1998 when a much loved British sweet changed its name to - we don't say that name here. It was all downhill.
£12/10 (conc.)
High Rise eState of Mind
Thu 26 & Fri 27 April, 7.15pm
Beats & Elements
This show is set in the future and now. Although now is pretty much the Victorian age. Foodbanks, child poverty, bad living and working conditions, dehumanisation of the working class... It's a show that explores why we need safe clean homes for all, shared fairly through Beats and songs, using living lopping and beatboxing.
From the makers of the critically acclaimed No Milk for the Foxes.
£8 (work-in-progress)
Free Lunch with the StenchWench
Thu 26 & Fri 27 Apr, 9pm
Catherine Hoffman
Free Lunch with the StenchWench is a rallying cry for times of brutal cuts and disparity, a solo account of shame and poverty from a personal perspective.
''A cross between performance art, stand-up, a gig and a call to arms. A humorous and truly compelling performance"' Desperate Optimists
£12/10(conc.)
Working Class Dinner Party
Sat 28 April, 6pm
Scottee
You are invited to dinner with Scottee in which he and his guests will talk about the C word ...class!
Joined by working class artists, thinkers and fakers we explore what it means to grow up on a council estate, who creates the definitions of working class identity and why learning how to be posh in an art world gets you places.
Whilst Scottee and his invited guests chew down into social politics you are encouraged to join the conversation and ask questions - you can also sit on your hands and do nothing.
Part show, part discussion and at some point a take away will arrive to feed us all - a dinner party that Nigella would wince at.
Originally commissioned by The Marlborough Theatre's 'Young, Queer and Skint' season
£12/ 10 (conc.)
Chav
Sat 28 Apr, 9pm
Chav is a neon, grey, diamante and hard hitting autobiographical journey, which playfully explores and comments on working class female identity, and how we both lose and reclaim ourselves through our lived experience of class.
£8 (work-in-progress)
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