Last year, theatre company Cardboard Citizens staged an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, a tragedy about a rich man who falls victim to his own generosity. Director Adrian Jackson reinterpreted the play as taking place in a management seminar, a sharkpool of smooth talkers and schemers. It was a clever move, celebrated by critics for giving new life to one of Shakespeare’s more obscure works. But perhaps the most unusual thing about Cardboard Citizens is that the company’s actors all have direct personal experience of homelessness. And now they’re taking on the managerial classes for real, with a series of workshops and events for corporate clients.
Cardboard Citizens’ spokesperson Lisa Caughey explains, “We’ve been going for 15 years and over the past couple of years we’ve been trying to cultivate new partners in the business community. It began with a few companies last year, mostly in investment management, who came along to seem our work in action. It’s based around discussions and talking about the problems that our characters face. The way that it started last year was that we invited some people to come along and see what were doing in hostels, sometimes it could be 20 people and sometimes it could be two people in their pyjamas. They’d come along and bring colleagues and the support just grew from there, as they could see how effective the work we were doing was.”
You can see how corporate clients might want to attach their name to a company like Cardboard Citizens to score ethical points, but what else is in it for them? Surely there’s an enormous gulf between a once-homeless actor and a middle manager in a suit?
Caughey says, “A lot of our workshops are based around teaching homeless people about employability and life skills and that’s transferable to anyone in society. It’s about teaching basic skills to do with listening, teamwork, things like that, but in a creative, on-the-level kind of way.”
In some ways, it’s a natural extension of a company ethos that has always been centred around using theatre to provoke debate and challenge received ideas. Much of Cardboard Citizens’ work with homeless and ex-homeless people involves “forum theatre”, a freeform and exploratory performance style that encourages audience members to interact with performers and intervene in the action.
Lara Pellini, an investment analyst, is herself a member of the corporate world. She also volunteers at a homeless shelter one day a week, which was how she first came into contact with the power of forum theatre. She accompanied a group of homeless people to a performance in a hostel, and was impressed by what she saw.
She recalls, “They write the scene themselves, and they’re based on real stories from their lives. They perform for 15 minutes and at the end one of the actors steps in and tries to engage the people in the audience, who are often homeless. She asks, ‘OK, what would you have done differently?’ and tries to make people take part. Initially there’s a lot of shyness but eventually everyone gets involved. They invite audience members onstage – which often is the kitchen of the shelter, so there’s not a lot of space, and the actors interact with you.” The actors don’t make things easy for audience participants, demonstrating that sometimes apparently obvious solutions aren’t as straightforward as they seem. Pellini was also impressed by the educational aspect of the performance, as homeless members of the audience stepped up to explain details of the benefits system and other intricacies of life on the edge. She was also struck by the effect it had on her fellow theatre-goers: “I was with some of my homeless clients, who have a lot of issues, and I was touched to see their involvement and how they cried and got attached… It’s not patronising because the actors were homeless themselves, so they know how it is.”
For Pellini, forum theatre’s benefit to the corporate as well as the cardboard citizen is clear: “Sometimes you have to make changes and take tough decisions, and the power of forum theatre is questioning yourself and putting out ideas and brainstorming. It gives you a different perspective. Even in work, we are faced with these things all the time.”
Pellini’s colleague Kathryn Whyte-Southcombe has also attended performances by Cardboard Citizens, and agrees that forum theatre could have a role to play in corporate training and development: “It engages people not just on a purely academic basis but in a very emotionally intelligent basis – you’re asking people to think about impact, to engage with the process and draw from their personal experiences. Maybe it could be about not homelessness but the last time they had to give negative feedback in the workplace, how that made them feel, how they’d do it differently. With forum theatre, people start to let down their guard and they evolve as a group.”
An awkward moment in the workplace is very different from the tales of family breakdown, addiction and abuse that Cardboard Citizens often deal with, but it speaks volumes for the company’s ability to draw links between concepts and communities. Their next hostel tour starts in September, when they’ll be taking their little capsule performances of potential outcomes, missed chances and risky choices to audiences made up of homeless people, shelter staff, curious outsiders, corporate sponsors… potentially anyone who’s ever wondered how things could have turned out differently.
