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Our Public House is a ‘state of the nation’ musical drama exploring the alienation people feel with politics through the lens of community, identity, change, and grief. How did this timely project come about?
JB: I wanted to do a show that explored who we are as a country. At Dash Arts, we had been thinking about what it was to be European, and then our gaze turned to Englishness and England and how to create a ‘state of the nation’ piece of theatre. In that search for a narrative and a story and an idea, I met an academic, Alan Finlayson, Professor of Political and Social Theory at the University of East Anglia, who said ‘you know, we all have this ability to articulate the things we feel passionate about but we don’t necessarily have the tools to do it’. So we conducted a workshop programme around the country helping people to talk about what they felt wasn’t working and what could change. I had this instinct that the stuff, the data, the thoughts, the reflections, the dreams, and the ambitions would be an incredible reflection of who we are as a country and who we could be.
We heard a lot of incredibly diverse reflections because we built a research process that enabled us to go to council estates, deaf communities, women’s prisons, schools, activist groups, old age homes, working men’s groups; to Cornwall, Sheffield, Liverpool, Norwich, all over the country, bits in between and above. Then I found a wonderful playwright, Barney Norris, and we thought about what the play could be. I had a feeling it would be great to set it in a pub, that this would be the place to talk about who we are as it is quintessentially English, but also it is somewhere some people feel included and some people don’t feel it’s for them – I thought that was an interesting metaphor fo