Wave of protest plays staged as UK theatres face closures and staff shortages

In several new productions, playwrights explore the cost of living crisis as their industry reels from funding cuts, cancellations and low wages

‘What galvanises me to get up in the morning and write is what is making me angry, upsetting me, frightening me,” says playwright Emily White. Like her previous plays, White’s next production, Joseph K and the Cost of Living, opening at Swansea Grand next month, seeks to make the political personal. It is a reimagining of Kafka’s nightmarish The Trial, whose protagonist is unexpectedly arrested but not told what for and always maintains his innocence.

White was a teenager when she first read the novel, about “being trapped in this kind of bureaucratic machine”, but she returned to it more recently after feeling that there was a “creeping authoritarianism” happening, with marginalised people’s rights “being clawed back by governments all over the world”. She continues: “In my version, it’s a story about state-led persecution of particular individuals and the reasons for that. And, in the background, we are very much today in Britain, in this world that we’re living in right now.” The play is set, she says, in a country that feels as if it is teetering on the brink of resistance and revolution. As such, the story incorporates food banks, homelessness, environmental protests, strikes and the government’s attempt to limit direct action.