Re-Enactment is a project about poverty, land rights, the past and Great Britain.
Each week in this country, more families tip over the edge and into food poverty. The Trussell Trust recently reported that community initiatives such as food banks are bearing the brunt of this crisis, with an exponential growth in users seeking support for persistent need, rather than temporary crises. Where once families could rely on the state for support, Britain’s welfare infrastructure has now dwindled to a standard not seen for centuries.
I make theatre about Britain’s enthusiasts. I specialise in bringing together people who don’t usually interact, in order to ask big questions about the society we all inhabit. Re-Enactment is my most urgent project yet: uniting Britain’s anti-poverty movement with English Civil War Re-enactment Societies. The lynchpin to this union is Gerard Winstanley, a radical and political visionary from the 17th Century who founded the pacifist Digger movement and challenged the social inequality of his day.
Winstanley saw the origins of poverty and social inequality in the inequitable distribution of land and set about taking it back. He led The Diggers in acts of quiet rebellion planting vegetables and toiling common land to create a sort of allotment activism. His work exposed the plight of communities left starving by the Civil War, as wealthy battalions focussed on fighting each other rather than preserving the communities they claimed to represent.
All this is going to culminate in a “Feastival” on 11th May. It’s FREE. And guess what? You’re not invited and that’s the point. It’s exclusively for the people of East Brighton.
For Re-Enactment I have been embedding myself into the Worlds of the English Civil War Re-enactment Society (I’m a musketeer) and vegetable growing. At the Feastival these two Worlds will collide. There will be a historical re-enactment of The Diggers (made up of vegetable growers and food volunteers) reclaiming land, a skirmish with The Parliamentarians (the English Civil War Society) as they try to reinstate the land, a choir singing Diggers songs, an authentic 17th century banquet for everybody cooked authentically over log fires, Mark Thomas, me dressed as Gerrard, performances, allotment activism, mischief and music. It will be part re-enactment, part demonstration and part live art piece.
Then one day once the dust has settled me and Mark Thomas are going to make a show about it all. You are ALL invited to that.