Photo: Nick Cobbing

Real Citizens

Theatre doesn’t come more socially relevant than Cardboard Citizens. Sam Beale strays far from the West End to find a cutting-edge theatre troupe dangerously close to the heart of real theatre.

Squall 12, Spring 1996, pp. 52-53.

Cardboard Citizens was formed in 1991 in conjunction with the London Bubble Theatre Company following a project with homeless people in Central London. "The qualification to perform in the company is to have experienced homelessness," explains Adrian Jackson, Artistic Director of the company. To reflect different kinds of homelessness the company tries to "maintain a balance of experience". It would probably be easier to have a company made up of people predominantly involved in squatting because they are, broadly speaking, more organised. But we really try to avoid that option” says Adrian. This range of experience is important "because we almost always devise our material and when you devise you rely on plundering people’s lives."

Last year Sandra Barefoot, a performer who works with Cardboard Citizens, lived in a London hostel for four months with her two year old son Ben: “It was pretty horrendous living in a single room with a child.” Sandra believes this experience was useful in the devising process for Cardboard Citizens: “My situation is specific so I found out loads from other people in the company about suicide, violence, all the other issues for homeless people, especially women. I’ve always been on people’s floors without a base but it’s different when you’re on the line, especially with a child.”

The company’s last tour was a Forum Theatre production, ‘A Woman of No Importance?’ It is the story of Lisa, a girl of 16 living with her seriously over-worked mother, her long-term unemployed stepfather and their two younger children. Family relations are strained. Lisa and her step father don’t get on, he beats her and her mother doesn’t have the time to notice how unhappy she is and doesn’t want to create friction with her old man. One night Lisa is caught sneaking out by her step-dad and he beats her up. So, she plans to leave home. None of her friends can put her up. She doesn’t accept a clumsy though well-meaning attempt at help from a teacher who notices her bruises, and she finds herself homeless.

The audience then sees her options: sleep on the streets with a bunch of friendly, though clearly alcoholic, street-sleepers, stay a few nights in a hostel where some creep goes into her room in the middle of the night, or go back home. She attempts to get benefits but (because she is only 16) is just passed around from queue to queue. She also gets bought dinner in a cafe by a man who wants to have sex with her.

The Forum Theatre style is ideal for theatre dealing with social/political issues. It was developed by Brazilian playwright and director Augusto Boal as part of his ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ and seeks to change an audience’s role from passive onlooker to collaborator and active participant. During a performance the audience is encouraged to replace the actors and take on their roles, changing the course of the action. Adrian explains: “We use Forum Theatre because it seems like a very real way of engaging people. It does seem like the quality of the experience that people get out of actually being involved in The Forum is significantly better than just watching something. Doing, living for a moment is a better learning experience than just seeing.” Sandra agrees: “Forum allows the play to be turned on its head and allows people to make it theatre just for that day for them.”

Most of the company’s eight national tours have been of hostels, drop-in-centres, day centres, and occasionally theatres. Issues covered include resettlement, family breakdowns and male prostitution. Their current tour is the first dedicated schools tour where the majority of the audience have not had direct experience of homelessness. Sandra explains: “It is about empowering. Boal has always said when you do Forum you should do it for the audience you are doing it for, for those who are at that point. But there is also wider education, wider awareness. It’s the same with any movement: you start at grassroots and move out. Things have to grow and in order to grow you have to open up.”

At the Arbor Centre in Tower Hamlets, Cardboard Citizens performed ‘A Woman of No Importance?’, as they had devised it, first explaining to the audience that they were going to perform it a second time giving audience members the chance to stop the action and intervene at any point by replacing a certain character and doing whatever they thought they could do to alter the course of events.

The style is very informal. The actors were all visible before the performance started, wandering around setting props and chatting. The show was fronted by Sandra and Bee Russell, the ‘Jokers’: kind of MCs, who field suggestions from the audience and move the action along, dealing with whatever comes up and taking on a variety of roles throughout. The other performers remain visible and do not act when they are not actually on stage. Their refreshingly straightforward and highly competent performances complemented the style.

The fact that they are all people who are or have been homeless, and they are all involved in devising each production, gives this company’s work a hard edge; all sentimentalism is shunned. Reality is the name of the game and there is nothing ‘worthy’ about it. Adrian notes that “it’s very important to us that there is not a message we are selling: that the company’s not preaching. Any learning that comes out of it comes out of that particular room at that particular time. With this show it would be very easy to become an arm of the state and go round stopping people leaving home, we wish to avoid that. When they were foruming at their best they were saying leave, but leave as well protected as you possibly can be.”

It is not easy, as an audience member, to get up and participate. “To recognise that everyone has a view on things and that everyone might have an idea may not sound that radical but in a way it still is for theatre,” says Adrian. “I know actor-luvvies go on about risk all the time but there is actually a real risk. You do not know what is going to happen. That keeps you on your mettle.”

Sandra values the fact that “you’re there with your audience’s agenda and no-one else’s. Forum works solely on other peoples’ agenda. That’s the best part. This play was predominantly for women aged 14-16. They were in your face all the time with stuff about where they wanted to be with their parents. Homelessness sometimes wasn’t addressed because it felt too removed from them. Often young women would really get hooked on the part of the play about family tensions because it was so strong for them: that’s where they’re at.”

At the Arbor Centre performance one man shouted “stop” after Lisa had been beaten up by her step-father, and leapt up to take on her character. His solution was to call the police. The other performers (who, according to the rules behave as their character would “on a bad day”), ready for just about anything, took on other roles and this part of the story was worked through to its conclusion: a discussion between Lisa, her mother and a social worker. One woman who angrily criticised the way Lisa was responding was forced onto the stage, by shouts of “you do it then” from the audience, to say what she wanted Lisa to say. A few audience members made very dodgy statements like “she got what she deserved, she shouldn’t have been sneaking out” and “she should have obeyed her father”. Everything is taken on board, no suggestions are ignored, including completely useless ones like the request from a cheery teenager who shouted “Commit suicide. Why don’t you just kill yourself?” Even that was considered as an option, although everyone agreed not a very productive one.

Someone wanted to see what would happen if Lisa joined the street-sleepers so the show went down that avenue for a while. By the end of the night people were on their feet, talking to each other, arguing with each other, shouting out ideas, expressing outrage and laughing loudly and they left the theatre still engaged in animated debate with total strangers.

Unfortunately, such successes do not guarantee financial support and Cardboard Citizens is currently facing a funding crisis. Their funding, as for all small-scale theatre companies, is always project-based and, says Adrian: “We’ve had a run of bad luck. We need to raise money quickly and most funding bodies work on a very long time-scale.” It is essential that the company maintains a core staff, particularly an administrator and a fund-raiser, and it is a point of principle that they pay their actors full equity rates. “There is a respect when you’re being paid,” says Sandra, “you do feel, yes, you value me. You value me here and you’re helping me out.”

The funding situation looks bleak for the next project, a co-production with London Bubble, the ‘Citz’ first non-forum production: “It’s an exciting project but if we don’t get the dosh, we don’t do it,” explains Adrian. “We need £10-15,000 fast. We will hit the horizon in February.” The company have unsuccessfully applied for funding from various charity bodies but, “we just didn’t win the lottery,” he says of the company’s bid for lottery money.

“You get shit from funders”, says Sandra. She believes they want certain material. “They don’t want the really hardcore stuff: they want it kind of nice”. “Any community-based work is seen as low status. The attitude: is forget it, love. But I would do that work again and again. Give me issue-based work every time.” It makes her angry that ‘straight’ theatre has so much more support: “I would rather this company survived than say the Royal Court. It’s a very political theatre company. Forum is a political tool. Brazilian playwright Boal is now using it in legislative work and for policy making. Everyday I remembered that I was doing this for a reason rather than just acting in a play and thinking why the fuck am I doing this? I believe a lot of women were empowered by it. They won’t forget it.”