I first heard about ‘Our Public House’ the last time I interviewed Josephine Burton of Dash Arts. She explained that she had been developing this show via community outreach, working with people who felt politically misrepresented and unheard. I thought it sounded like an amazing project then. 

The result of that development work is a play written by Barney Norris, with songs by Jonathan Walton, directed by Josephine herself. Performances began last month in Leeds, and after tour dates in Merseyside, Coventry, Cornwall and Sheffield, the company will perform at the Marylebone Theatre from 30 Jun-4 Jul. 

I arranged a catch up to find out more about the play, the creative process and community involvement behind it, and what to expect next from Dash Arts. 

CM: Can you tell us a bit about the content of ‘Our Public House’? Who is it about and where does the narrative take us?
JB: It’s set in a pub called the Albion and the first thing I’d say is that it’s your local. The moment you walk in, you recognise these people.

Sanjana, the landlady, holding the whole place together by sheer force of will and warmth. Her daughter, pulling in a different direction. The regulars who’ve been coming in for years and know each other’s business better than their own.

The play unfolds over several weeks in the fallout from a local election where the entire community spoiled their ballots. Nobody won. And into that vacuum of anger, of uncertainty and of possibility all these lives collide.

There’s a love affair that nobody saw coming, secrets that have been kept too long, and an open mic that can change everything. It’s messy and funny and very human.

CM: What themes are explored through the play?
JB: All the big ones, really… but worn lightly. Love, in several forms: romantic love that arrives at completely the wrong moment, the fierce complicated love of family, the quiet love between people who’ve shared a local for 20 years.

Grief, and the question of how you move forward when something, or someone, is gone. The feeling of not being heard, which I think is one of the defining experiences of living in Britain right now. And underneath all of it, the country: who we are, what we’ve become, and whether we still believe in each other.

What I love about what Barney has written is that none of these themes sit in separate boxes. The political is personal and the personal is political, as they say – and in a pub, you can’t really separate them anyway.

CM: How would you describe it in terms of style and genre?
JB: A soap opera with songs, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment! The best soaps understand something profound: that the drama of ordinary life, in ordinary places, between ordinary people, is endlessly compelling.

That despite our disagreements and our grievances and our capacity to wound each other, we keep coming back. We’re family. We love each other. And tomorrow we’ll do it all again.

Add live music, a cast of characters you’ll want to spend more time with, and some genuinely surprising moments of political electricity, and that’s roughly what you’re in for.

CM: What style of music is used in the show and who has created it?
JB: Every character bares their soul through song – and the extraordinary thing is that each of them has their own entirely distinct musical world. There’s ska, rock, gospel, ballads – because these are people whose inner lives sound nothing like each other, and Jonathan Walton, who has created the music, has honoured that completely.

Jonathan and I go back a long way – we were in a band together at college and he worked on Dash’s very first production back in 2006, so I always knew what he’s capable of. But this surpassed even my expectations.

The challenge was immense: to take real speech material, the actual words of real people from our workshops and find the music living inside them. He found it every time. There’s a musicality in the way people speak that most of us don’t notice. Jonathan noticed and built entire songs from it.

CM: Do you regard the play as political? Does it send specific messages?
JB: Absolutely political but not in the way that makes people nervous. It’s not a polemic. It doesn’t tell you who to vote for or hand you a leaflet on the way out.

What it does is sit honestly with the feeling that’s everywhere right now; that things aren’t getting better, that the people making decisions aren’t listening to the people affected by them, that the gap between Westminster and the rest of the country has become a chasm.

The spoiled ballots at the heart of the story come from that feeling. It’s a feeling we heard again and again in our workshops, from people right across the political spectrum.

But the other message, the one I care about just as much, is the soap opera one. That despite all of it, we still love each other. That a community is more resilient than its politics.

That you go home furious and you come back tomorrow and you sit down next to the person you disagree with and you order another round. That could be the most political thing of all.

CM: Can you tell us about the work with community groups that inspired the play? How do the results of that work inform the play?
JB: We’ve been running speech-making workshops across England for three years, in schools, prisons, working men’s clubs, community centres, deaf organisations, asking people one question: what would you change?

Over 700 people have answered that question and the answers have been magnificent. Furious, funny, heartbroken, specific, surprising. About housing and NHS waiting lists and green spaces and mental health and the cost of a pint. About feeling invisible. About wanting to be useful.

Those speeches didn’t become the play in a literal sense – it’s not verbatim theatre. But they became the interior lives of the characters. Each of our fictional characters carries a real speech, one that I felt resonated with who they are, and Jonathan has built their songs from those words.

So when you hear the characters sing, you’re hearing something distilled from real people’s experiences. You might not know that, sitting in the audience. But you feel it.

CM: What inspired you to start that work to begin with?
JB: Honestly, curiosity and a growing conviction that the story we were being told about the country wasn’t the whole story. The media feeds us polarisation. Social media amplifies the most extreme voices. And I kept thinking: that’s not what I see when I’m actually with people. So we went out to look and listen.

What we found was so much more interesting than the official narrative: communities full of ideas, full of solidarity, full of people who had thought deeply about what needed to change and had never been given a platform to say so. The play is our attempt to give them one.

CM: During this tour, you have local people joining the performances: can you tell us a bit about how that works?
JB: At every venue, up to eight local community performers join the professional cast of six on stage. They’ve been through our workshops, they’ve written their own speeches, and they deliver them live as part of the drama – two different speeches each night.

Our professional cast respond to those speeches in character, so the play is genuinely alive to what’s being said, night by night, city by city. The issues they raise, local and national, ripple through the action.

It means no two performances are the same. It means the show in Leeds feels like Leeds, and the show in Coventry feels like Coventry. And it means that the people who inspired this play get to be in it. That matters enormously to me.

CM: Tell us more about why it’s important to you to involve the local community in this way.
JB: Because without them it’s a play about people. With them it’s a conversation, between a piece of theatre and the place it’s playing in, between professional artists and the communities that make our work meaningful. The community involvement isn’t a garnish. It’s structural. It’s why the show exists.

There’s also something about ownership. This play was made with the country, not just for it. The people who stood up in our workshops and said something brave and true deserve to be part of what that brave and true thing became.

CM: As director, how closely have you worked with playwright Barney Norris on this
JB: Very. We’ve created this together, really, from the ground up.

Barney has written the words, and they’re beautiful, but the world the words live in has been built jointly, through years of conversation, through the R&D weeks at the National Theatre Studio and HOME Manchester, through watching what happened when actors met the speech material and something unexpected ignited.

It’s been one of the most creatively fulfilling collaborations of my career. He’s a writer of extraordinary generosity, genuinely interested in what the actors and the research are telling us, always willing to go back in and find something truer.

CM: What future plans do you have for Dash Arts?
JB: Our next big project is ‘Songs Of Solidarity’, a new music-theatre epic about migration, which I’m co-directing with Maria Aberg of Projekt Europa.

We’re working with five extraordinary writers – Sabrina Mahfouz, Inua Ellams, Saili Katebe, Leo Boix and Anna Sulan Massing – alongside a Kurdish-Iranian refugee composer, and a group of UNHCR storytellers who have lived experience of displacement.

The premise is that every age needs its own epic and ours is a story of people crossing borders, rebuilding lives and imagining new worlds. We’re in development now, with a premiere planned for 2027-2028.

CM: What’s coming up next for you, after this?
JB: Sleep, mainly. And family time which I am absolutely desperate for. One of my kids had their first A-level exam on the same day as our get-in in Leeds, which feels like a fairly accurate summary of the particular balancing act of being a working parent in theatre.

‘Our Public House’ is on at Marylebone Theatre from 30 Jun-4 Jul. See the venue website here for more information and to book tickets. 

LINKS: marylebonetheatre.com | dasharts.org.uk | instagram.com/burton.josephine