Happy endings in unlikely places

Cardboard Citizens, a homeless people’s theatre company, can turn any space into a theatre. This winter, dining rooms, IT suites, prison libraries and even chapels have been transformed. ‘Or Am I Alone?’, by Lizzie Nunnery, is a play based on research with members of Cardboard Citizens, and performed by actors who have had experience of being homeless. It showed three different characters and their routes into homelessness. It toured to more than forty venues in five weeks – from drop-in centres for rough sleepers to prisons – and was seen by more than 1,300 people.

In a ‘Forum Theatre’ play – a technique invented by Brazilian theatre maker Augusto Boal – the outcomes for the characters are designed to provoke a reaction in the audience. This is not a happy ending. However, once the play is over audience members are encouraged to think about how the protagonists in the stories could have acted differently. Anyone with an idea can get up and enter into the scene and try to change things for the better. The traditional barriers come down and the room comes alive with debate. Audience members engage with the actors.

These spontaneous interventions are sometimes are hilarious, sometimes extremely moving. In one intervention in a drop-in centre, a woman stepped into the story of Lucy who was struggling to find meaning in her life by working for a charity after leaving rehab. Nervously, the woman drew from her own experiences with relapse and had the character of Lucy call her sponsor and admit to cravings. This same woman returned to see the show again and confided that subsequently she had gone to an AA meeting, inspired by rehearsing that change in the context of the forum – and that she had not had a drink since.

While not all interventions will see such dramatic results, you often have the sense that everyone intervening on stage during a forum show may be rehearsing for actual changes in their own life. After the performance, the actors mingle with the audience and encourage anyone who is interested to take up membership with the company which entitles them to attend workshops and offers access to advice and guidance services.

The issues in the plays are drawn straight from the members of the company’s experiences. Subjects for this autumn’s tour are now being debated in workshops. In the current climate of proposed cuts to housing benefits we may be facing a new wave of evictions and people struggling to cope and stay accommodated.