The Working Class Project

Responding to the shortage of opportunities for working-class women in British theatre, Mama Quilla created The Working-Class Project as a platform for female artists, especially writers, to tell their own stories in their own voices.

Supported by Arts Council England and partner venues, the project brought together new and emerging working-class women writers with women whose experiences are often excluded from public life: women affected by poverty, homelessness, detention, domestic abuse, political persecution, the family courts and migration. Through workshops, interviews, devising sessions and public sharing, participants explored what it meant to be working class in Britain in 2018.

The project developed two strands of work. Voices presented original material created by new artists from testimony, lived experience and workshop writing. Alongside this, Kay Adshead reimagined her earlier state-of-the-nation play Bacillus as Virilicus, a fierce future myth about division, poverty, otherness and the possibility of a people’s revolution. Directed by Orit Azaz, Virilicus was shared in a bare-bones workshop production with a professional cast, musician and community chorus.

The project culminated in a week-long residency at the Shop Front Theatre, Coventry, where Voices and Virilicus were performed to audiences in an informal, immediate and politically charged setting. The work opened up theatre as a space for those rarely heard, connecting professional artists, first-time writers, community participants and local audiences. It also generated a legacy of new writing, new creative relationships and short films documenting the shared work.