The national shortage of affordable housing hasn’t led to any shortage of theatre exploring the crisis. There have been some great shows – from Philip Ridley’s satire Radiant Vermin to Sh!t Theatre’s Letters to Windsor House – examining the pressure that high rents put on personal relationships, while Lung’s E15 told the story of the evicted teenage mothers who took on Newham council in east London.
But who better to offer a meditation on our relationship with bricks and mortar than Cardboard Citizens, a pioneering company who for the last 25 years have been making theatre with and for homeless people, in settings from theatres to hostels and prisons? Their ambitious latest project takes the form of three cycles of three plays each, written by Anders Lustgarten, EV Crowe and Lin Coghlan, among others, that combine to provide “an incomplete history of housing” from the late 19th century to the present day.
It is inevitably kaleidoscopic and somewhat bitty, leaving the audience to piece together the connections. The cycle I saw, performed with commitment and vim by a cast of 10, began with Sonali Bhattacharyya’s Slummers, a tale of do-gooders and the deserving poor. Victorian teenager Polly and her family have been rescued from the notorious Nichol slum in Bethnal Green and rehoused. But at a time of increasing political dissent, the family must appear before an all-male board of philanthropists, and prove that they are not political troublemakers.
It may over-extend the evening, but the snippets of verbatim or social history that are interspersed between each playlet are often as interesting as the mini-dramas themselves. Particularly as they remind us that housing crises, of one kind or another, have always been with us. We also learn that the social housing that Polly and her family were so eager to retain in 19th-century Shoreditch now sells for £850,000 per home on the open market.
The 1970s squatters’ movement is evoked in The Ruff Tuff Cream Puff Estate Agency, written by Heathcote Williams with Sarah Woods and inspired by Williams’s attempt to set up an estate agency for homeless people. A satire full of cartoonish energy, it both pokes fun at the ideal of an independent utopia, and operates as a lament for lost opportunities. Shortly after the period when the play is set, Thatcher began selling off the housing stock.
Which leads us to the present, and Stef Smith’s Back to Back to Back, by far the most interesting of the trio, in which two couples live side by side in a privatised housing block in Peckham, south London: one couple as renters and the other as owners. For both couples, what they want remains stubbornly just out of reach, while an uncollected mattress is an eyesore on the street outside and the damp from the private flat marches ever onwards. Smith is superb on the tensions between want and need, and what constitutes being rich or poor. For the homeless, someone else’s eyesore is an unexpected treasure.
•At the Bunker, London, until 13 May. Box office: 020-7234 0486.
