Using theatre and drama to engage citizens and decision-makers as co-creators of political action with real-world outcomes. Not political theatre in the traditional sense — no didactic message, no predetermined conclusion. Instead, the work creates cultural spaces in which people can disagree productively, build arguments through performance, and hold their representatives to account.
“Democracy is, by its very nature, reliant on bureaucratic process. But it can also be a cultural pursuit — one in which participation both celebrates and enacts the values of dialogue, self-representation and agonism.” — Theatre for Democracy (2020)
I have watched a room full of strangers — teenagers, pensioners, councillors — argue passionately about a local issue that, an hour earlier, most of them claimed not to care about. Within that hour, people who had arrived as opponents were building solutions together that none of them could have imagined alone.
Moments like that changed how I think about democracy. Not as a system to be explained or a process to be endured, but as a cultural practice — something that has to be made and remade, in rooms, between people, through the kinds of encounter that theatre makes possible.
Theatre for Democracy repositions democratic engagement within a cultural frame, creating events where the possibility for change exists without the didacticism of traditional political theatre or the comfortable domestication of drama-for-personal-growth.
The work began in 2004 with Critical Engagement: Theatre for Democracy, a programme that grew to work with over seventy-five local authorities across England and Wales. Projects ranged from touring adaptations of dystopian literature to Youth Select Committees, Political Speed Dating events, and community debates — all designed to provoke dialogue, demystify the processes of democracy, and bridge the divide between politics and everyday life. Partners included the Home Office, the Electoral Commission, and the Local Government Association.
Since 2010, this work has continued through the Applied Theatre programme at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, where over fifty projects have been delivered across Merseyside. The changes are often humble — the moving of a bus stop, extra storage for a foodbank, a simple reappraisal of local priorities — but democracy does not deal in grand finales. The end of a project need not be the end of engagement; indeed, it may well be the very beginning.
“Or we could dare. We could dare to create the space in which the feared awkward conversation has, instead, a chance to be transformed into dialogue.” — The Dynamics of Disagreement (2018)
The theoretical underpinnings draw on Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and Chantal Mouffe’s conception of agonism. Conflict is treated not as a failure of process but as an inescapable feature of the political. The aim is not consensus but the creation of spaces where competing ideas can be articulated, problematised, and re-imagined — where disagreement is recognised as the legitimate expression of contradictory ideas in a pluralistic society.
The design of events consciously inverts conventional power dynamics. Resident participants set the agenda. Performance and drama techniques are used to build rhetorical agency — ensuring participants can appeal to character, logic, and emotion rather than relying on logic alone. Facilitation draws on Socratic questioning blended with Freirean problematisation.