The Newham Plays – towards the making of a pro-localist theatre in Newham, East London

The Newham Plays have achieved results in three research areas:

(1) how to give local youth living in a community usually considered a "cold spot" for arts performance and education, opportunities for creative expression and participating in building a professional theatre show.

(2) how to put a local area and its community spaces on the map for the wider public, benefitting local organisations, raising awareness of Newham's sites/venues and the heritage/history of the borough.

(3) how iconic literary classics and historical drama/biography can be ‘remixed’ and ‘localized’ to reflect a sense of a place, people and culture., e.g., the 'hoodie’(or Canary Wharf) Revolution Farm, the multicultural, East End Alice in Canning Town.

The use of public environment as alternative auditoria and ‘mixed economy’ participation to create new writing which
originates from, and is rooted in, a community’s history, culture and people. This presentation/research contends that
a localist and grassroots approach is the most effective way of empowering wider access to the arts. It argues for an
increased emphasis on performance in local spaces rather than in mainstream auditoria. The Newham Plays series
have marked out a distinct territory by making a virtue of the absence of elements most commonly associated with
conventional theatre spaces, e.g. a stage, scenery, lighting, seating. My research contends that non-institutionalized
theatre in community, site-specific and localized environments can offer a greater resistance/indifference to
commodification or mass reproduction than mainstream or commercial performance. It is precisely the evanescence
of this kind of theatre, its ephemerality, that provides or proves its own justification or meaning, without the need to
validate itself by entering the “economy of reproduction” (Phelan 1993).”