A people’s theatre for Brighton – an interview with Naomi Alexander

ABSTRACT

In this piece, Naomi Alexander, Artistic Director of Brighton People’s Theatre, provides an overview of the first year of this new organisation. Inspired by a sense of injustice at the way publicly subsidised theatre is configured for those from privileged backgrounds, Alexander set up Brighton’s People’s Theatre in 2015. The aim was to create a form of theatre and a theatre organisation that works with people who do not normally engage in theatre. The Document presented here is an edited version of an interview between Alexander and Jenny Hughes that took place early in 2016, as the group was approaching the performance of their first piece, Tighten Our Belts, which explores contemporary experiences of austerity.

KEYWORDS:

• People’s theatre
• austerity
• cultural value
• devising
• unemployment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Naomi Alexander is a creative producer and theatre-maker with 20 years experience of working across the theatre and community development sectors. She has an MA in Applied Theatre (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama) and is a Fellow of Birkbeck University’s Centre of Contemporary Theatre. For more information, please go to https://naomiontheatre.net/

Jenny Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Manchester. She researches the relationships between theatre and poverty, activist theatres and aspects of applied theatre.

Notes

1. For more information about Brighton People’s Theatre go to https://brightonpeoplestheatre.org/ Accessed March 15, 2016.

2. See http://welcometodialogue.com/ Accessed March 15, 2016.

3. The ‘Work Capability Assessment’ is a controversial test used by welfare services in the UK to determine whether claimants are eligible for sickness benefits (see also Sarah Bartley’s article in this issue). For an account of deaths arising from this process, see Butler (2015).