‘When you feel something, that’s what fuels you’: how a new generation of performers is reviving the theatre of protest

A clowning show about food poverty? A catwalk show about debt? A dance about an immigration raid? Although it may sound unlikely, these are all highlights of the autumn theatre season, staged by fiercely independent artists committed to the possibilities of social change and who follow in the great tradition of British companies such as Clean Break, whose work focuses on women in prison, or Cardboard Citizens, who make theatre with and for homeless people.

Based in Liverpool, Ugly Bucket were inspired to create Stuffed after witnessing firsthand the rise in food bank usage in the early 2020s. For context, in 2023 the food bank charity Trussell reported delivering more than 3.2m food parcels; back in 2010, the figure was closer to 60,000. “We’re trying to bring people who have capacity into this solution to food poverty,” says Grace Gallagher, the company’s artistic director and a performer in Stuffed. And she wants to ask: “As a community of people, are we helping our neighbour? Are we doing enough?”

In London, ThisEgg came to prominence with Me & My Bee, an acclaimed family show about why we need to save bees, and Dressed, a tender reflection on gender-based violence. Their new show, Un/fortunately, was initially intended to be for a young audience, says artistic director and performer Josie Dale-Jones. “I wanted to explain economics and give young people some awareness of how using money impacts those around them.” The more that she learned about the scale of public debt, however – in 2025, UN Trade and Development reported that global debt had reached a record high of $111 trillion – the less she felt capable of presenting “a positive conversation about money”. She says: “As a society, we need to have a really hard look at ourselves. Acknowledge how deep in the shit we are, and what money does to human relationships.”

Food poverty is one of the things unequal distribution of money can produce; another is the “hostile environment”, announced by then home secretary Theresa May in 2012 and still conditioning UK immigration policy today. Glasgow-based playwright Katharine Williams explores its impact with These Are Our Neighbours, which opens at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow next week. The play is inspired by a protest that took place in Glasgow in May 2021, when hundreds of people – a mixture of local residents and anti-raids activists – filled Kenmure Street to resist the attempted removal by immigration enforcement officers of two men, originally from India, who had lived there for a decade (also the subject of a recent documentary, Everybody to Kenmure Street). Williams was in Edinburgh at the time, and watched the events unfold on social media. “I’ll never forget watching Aamer Anwar [the human rights lawyer who negotiated the two men’s release] saying that we had an agreement and it was in writing,” Williams says. “You know that thing when every hair on your crown stands up? I knew then that we were making this play.”

All three shows are rooted in lengthy research processes: Williams’s play is built from interviews with people who were on Kenmure Street that day; Ugly Bucket spoke to volunteers at a number of food banks; while Dale-Jones organised a number of assignments for her collaborators, asking them to “work out the surplus-deficit model, or what capitalism actually is”, then present their learnings to the team “in an entertaining and accessible way”. After all, no one wants to go to the theatre to hear a lecture or, as Dale-Jones puts it, “a good podcast”.

Instead, these theatre-makers use the possibilities of the stage to transform their material, giving it physical presence. These Are Our Neighbours is performed by just three people, but while each one has a particular character to play, they use movement to embody a number of others: a person carrying a child on their shoulders, another person resisting arrest. At points, the three of them adopt the distinctive, vigilant physicality of police officers, in a rigid and menacing line. This is what makes theatre special, says one of the performers, Umar Butt. “It charges me when I can see a person in front of me telling this story. It feels as if we have a shared experience.” 

Gallagher agrees, adding that Ugly Bucket use clowning because it “recognises absurdity, and if we can laugh, we can listen. We’re using the clown to challenge: we intend the show to be confronting. But if I’m going to make a serious show about food banks, I could spoon-feed you that sadness from a website. The numbers and the data are really important, but when you can feel something, that’s what fuels you. So the clowning is about building deeper connections, so you can empathise with that person who is moving a light bulb around every room of their house.”

ThisEgg frequently use costume to explore ideas, and Un/fortunately takes this to the max, dressing up financial, political and ethical concepts as though for a catwalk. The character of Greed prowls beneath a suit of many suits, unnecessary jackets and ties dripping from their shoulders, while Justice creeps about with its face covered in chain mail, clutching a bucket and mop. “We want the show to get people talking about money,” says Dale-Jones, and the costume and performance choices give audiences plenty to debate. Around the show, which was performed recently at Shoreditch Town Hall in London, audiences could also engage in a programme of talks and workshops that allowed audiences to explore the impact of where they choose to bank and how to resist bailiffs.

Ugly Bucket have also programmed engagement activities alongside Stuffed: audiences are invited to join a pre-show dinner and a post-show discussion, and encouraged to donate food items on the evening, too. “Those donations are immediately used in the show as props,” says Gallagher, “so as you're watching you see your donations become part of the story. Afterwards, we put you in a room with the people who are doing the work locally, so you can find out what’s already going on and become a part of that.”

What about protest? The Kenmure Street action was successful because so many ordinary people came out to support the two men. But Kate Bradley, technical stage manager for These Are Our Neighbours, and an activist in Glasgow, mourns the impact of “the rollback of protest rights that has happened in just five years. It shouldn’t feel ingrained that peaceful protesters can expect to be abducted off the streets. So it’s really important to see a hopeful, victorious story that isn’t of a bygone time when protesting worked, that isn’t the Suffragettes.”

Cynics might ask: if you’re that worried about the state of the world, why are you making theatre at all? Ugly Bucket are alert to the question. “Even when we were applying for funding for Stuffed,” says Gallagher, “we thought about the cost of the show versus what that money could do if donated to a food bank.” But the question is also a trap, designed to pit the arts against “real” social needs. It’s as a result of such thinking that Ugly Bucket applied for public funding to tour to 12 cities this autumn, but were only successful when they reduced the tour to three places: Liverpool, London and Leeds. Meanwhile, the funding received from Arts Council England for Un/fortunately only covered the talks and workshops; ThisEgg otherwise survives on theatre tax relief.

Williams, the playwright behind These Are Our Neighbours, has more activist kudos than most. As a social organiser, their projects have included Crew for Calais, through which theatre-workers built homes for people in the former refugee camp, and People Powered, which coordinated support for the NHS during the Covid-19 pandemic. They speak of theatre’s role in terms of “care, equality and acceptance”, while ThisEgg’s Dale-Jones says: “It’s empathy-building. And that’s something we all need more practice at these days.” 

Suggest to Dale-Jones that money might be the root of all social problems, and she will shake her head. “I don’t think money is the problem, I think we are. Money just exposes what’s bad in us.” In response, these works attempt something transformational: rooting out the good in humanity, and planting it where it can thrive.

These Are Our Neighbours is at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, 14-17 October 

Stuffed is at the New Diorama, London NW1, 13-24 October, and the Warehouse in Holbeck, Leeds, 31 October