Working Class Hero is an absurdist satire in which two actors put on some silly wigs (and accents) and take us on a high-speed romp through the British class system. We sat down with Theo Hristov to discuss their upcoming production. Tickets are available here.
What sparked Working Class Hero—was there a specific moment as a Bulgarian migrant in the UK arts scene that made you think, “this has to be a play”? It was more the cumulative effect of being seen for a certain type of role that did not reflect any reality I had lived. Having always identified as working class, when I started acting, it quickly dawned on me that working class as an identity marker in the UK may not hold enough space for me because I’m also Bulgarian and my accent – the bearer of my national, cultural and ethnic identity – was being used to put me in a box. I was either one or the other and I couldn’t possibly be both.
I knew it was something I would have to address at some point if for no-one else but myself. And then Emma Corrin broke the internet when they said they wanted to do a “gritty” independent film “up North” with “an outrageous accent” and “red hair” and suddenly I had my story. What if a white privately-educated POSH ACTOR frustrated by being pigeonholed decides he wants to do something different. And the thing is Emma Corrin is a great actor and I’ll watch them do anything. That’s the point of acting. It’s an act of sublime empathy to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. To see the world how they see it. But it is a problem when only people from a specific background get that opportunity. Working class actors rarely do. As for migrants – just forget about it.
The show mixes sketch comedy, physical theatre, and multimedia—what does absurdism let you say about class and migration that straight realism can’t? I personally find constraints really helpful and in this case they opened up interesting new avenues to address big topics such as class and migration through humour.
The form dictated the story. Subsequently we had two short R&Ds (and this is a fringe show with no funding so a big shoutout to places like Theatre Deli, Theatre Peckham and Southwark Playhouse for giving us the physical space to experiment) which really helped in clarifying the vision of how we wanted to tell this story.
It could have been more realistic. But it just never felt like that’s what the show needed. If anything, it needed me to lean into my silly, slightly off-kilter, darkly comedic side to make those ideas really fly. Satire just allows for so much more. It lends itself to critiquing power structures and systems with the intention to point a way forward.
We also understood that by showing certain stereotypes we may be inadvertently introducing them to some people for the first time. And we didn’t want to do that. So it seemed like the only appropriate way to deal with those was to mock them.
Your line “You’re not working class. You’re Bulgarian.” cuts to identity and gatekeeping—how do you navigate British class labels when they’re used to exclude migrants?
I went to state-funded non fee-paying schools and qualified for free school meals. My parents worked multiple jobs, and the work was always shiftwork. We didn’t have nannies. We couldn’t afford a summer holiday every year. We borrowed books from the library. I would wear my big sister’s clothes when she grew out of them.
Money has always been a factor for me growing up but reducing something like class to just financial means is just plain wrong. I didn’t grow up here. I don’t have the same cultural capital, the same references. So I couldn’t possibly be part of this community, could I?
That’s the story the media in this country tells us through the images it feeds us. Even though a large part of working class people in the UK have always been migrants, I only saw working class people on screen as a monolith. They were usually pitted against migrants who they had a lot more in common with but were told they didn’t. They were told we were after their jobs. And sadly that’s the narrative that spills out into real life and has real consequences.
The one thing I was unprepared for when starting out was how big of a part accent still plays on class distinctions in the UK. And what assumptions people make based on your accent. And when it
comes to somebody who doesn’t have a native accent – you’re suddenly in yet another category. And how can we solve this problem of representation if we only have these big boxes for all of us? That’s what we wanted to address with the show – make those boxes more pliable so they reflect the wide variety of native and migrant backgrounds and experiences making up the mosaic of working class identity in this country.
POSH ACTOR and Stephan’s friendship buckles under typecasting and bias—how did you and Oscar Nicholson build that dynamic, and what truths were most uncomfortable to stage?
Oscar was in my year at drama school. Looking back we were very lucky as our cohort became very close-knit very quickly and we felt safe to try things and fail. Which is what every good acting training course should aim for. Oscar and I were also in a production of Romeo & Juliet and we built a very good dynamic there working together which I felt could translate well into this play. We had an early draft where the character of POSH ACTOR was described as “a stronger, posher, better version” of Stephan and I thought we could really lean into that idea of what if we have a similar starting point but due to forces outside our control the paths we take are vastly dissimilar. Forces like accent, class, and background. POSH ACTOR intrinsically has more value in this industry which is largely made by middle-class people for middle-class audiences. And of course that’s a fallacy because an accent also indicates a specific background, social skills, and level of education and contacts that Stephan just doesn’t have.
What’s come across most often in rehearsals is the level of direct competition these two people are put into which brings out the worst in both and leads to some truly horrific moments of conflict. There’s a lot of ego involved. They don’t listen to what the other needs. These moments only work when you really trust your fellow actors and they allow you to go to those places that are dark and ugly, to be truly vulnerable. And Oscar and I have that in spades. Which will hopefully also make the moments of tenderness and kindness all the more powerful.
VOILA! gave the piece its scratch debut—what changed between 2024 and this full outing at Barons Court Theatre under Blanka Szentandrássy’s direction?
We had a great fifteen minutes which utilised satire well to set up the rules of the game and situate the audience in the heightened world of the play but the rest of the play didn’t live up to that start. I felt like I was preaching to the choir and that’s not something I’d want to see myself. We needed our development time to really explore what the story we wanted to tell was but even more importantly – how we wanted to tell it. We we were a lot more interested in making an entertaining show which leant into comedy and allowed us to not spell things out for the audience. To show, not tell.
Blanka came aboard for one of the R&Ds and since her practice is very movement-based, she really helped shape the physical language of the play and how we can address some of the themes we talk about non-verbally.
Humour as resistance: what do you want audiences to be laughing at on the night— and still thinking about on the way home?
Humour to me is the easiest way to make the audience recognise something, get them on board, and then make them complicit so they themselves need to search for a solution. It also allowed us to take bold swings in how we approach big identity labels like working class, posh, and migrant. We want the audience to laugh at the absurdity of the plot twists, where we take the story and the caricatures we’ve turned most of the characters into. Everything in the play is heightened and the tone is very specific so we just hope people will resonate. At the same time, at the centre of the play we have Stephan – the real migrant working class hero who should be the audience’s eyes and ears through which they experience the story. And by this act of empathy we want to show that behind the boxes, there is always a real human being. Recently seeing another Bulgarian actor Julian Kostov in Beth Steel’s Till The Stars Come Down playing an actual three-dimensional character who also happens to be a first-generation immigrant was really impactful for me but that’s so rare. Theatre even more than film or telly. I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve seen someone with a foreign accent on stage in a subsidised theatre. If first-generation immigrants who don’t have a native accent make up around forty percent of what London looks like, why do our stages not represent that?