A Windrush generation boxer, a Polish migrant marked with a tattoo and a man with a bottle of gin and a television in his shopping trolley. These are just some of the true stories and reasoned speculations about the lives and deaths of homeless people explored in new production Bystanders, by Cardboard Citizens.
Following the success of Cathy in 2017, which drew significant acclaim from audiences and critics, Bystanders by Cardboard Citizens premieres at Edinburgh Festival Fringe this summer.
After last year’s revelations by The Bureau for Investigative Journalism on the largely unreported and unrecorded scale of homeless deaths in the UK – with the staggering reality of 800 homeless men and women having died between October 2017 and March 2019 – Bystanders gives those unheard voices the stage in true-life stories told with authenticity, wit and sadness.
All of the cast have different personal experiences of homelessness – though these are not the subject of the play. Each actor portrays multiple characters in the performance of these diverse histories, laying bare a callousness which may shock.
Cardboard Citizens has been producing and touring theatre work for over 28 years, collaborating with theatres and theatre companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company and English National Opera. The company is the UK’s leading practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed, a collection of techniques created originally by Augusto Boal in which theatre is used as an instrument for social and political change.
Adrian Jackson, Writer, Director and Founder of Cardboard Citizens says
Bystanders will be a theatrical eulogy, part commemoration, part celebration, part condemnation, part post-mortem, part intra-vitam, around homeless lives and deaths and the causes of both. These stories remind us how much is to be done.
Summerhall at the Edinburgh Fringe – Show dates: 2 – 25 August (not 12th or 19th)