We sat down for an exclusive interview with Josephine Burton, Artistic Director of Dash Arts and director of ‘Our Public House’.
‘Our Public House’ is on tour from 15th May-4th July. Tickets here.
1. ‘Our Public House’ draws on the real voices of over 600 people across the UK. What was the process of transforming these lived experiences into a cohesive theatrical narrative?
It was genuinely iterative and for a long time, deliberately open-ended. We didn’t arrive at the workshops with a play already mapped out waiting to be illustrated by what we heard. We went out not knowing what we’d find or what form the eventual work would take. Verbatim? Documentary? A piece of music theatre? The research came first and the form followed.
What gradually became clear was that the speeches we’d gathered were too alive, too specific, too individual to flatten into a single narrative voice. Each one belonged to a particular person in a particular place with a particular set of experiences behind them. So rather than creating verbatim theatre, we let them become the interior lives of fictional characters – the thing each character knows and feels and has been quietly carrying. Barney Norris was extraordinary in that process. He has a gift for building fictional worlds that are genuinely porous to reality without losing their dramatic shape.
The pub setting helped enormously. It gave us a container – one place, a storm outside – within which all these different voices and perspectives could credibly collide. And the music gave us a way to let the speeches themselves be heard, transformed into songs, without stopping the drama dead.
2. Your work with Dash Arts often sits at the intersection of theatre, music, and social enquiry. How did that cross-artform approach shape the creation and staging of ‘Our Public House’?
At Dash we’ve always believed that the big questions deserve the full range of artistic tools – that music can get somewhere text alone can’t, that movement can articulate what speech won’t. So the cross-artform instinct was there from the start. But what was interesting about ‘Our Public House’ was that each element found its own organic justification within the world of the play, rather than being imposed from outside.
The music exists in the play because Sanjana’s pub hosts an open mic night. The speeches exist because she runs a speechwriting workshop for her locals. The BSL exists because one of our characters is a deaf politician who communicates in multiple ways. Nothing is decorative. Everything is load-bearing. In this project, we were reaching for an integration where the form and the content are genuinely the same thing, and I think we found it.The staging reflects that too. We’re working with Good Teeth Design on a set that’s rooted in the pub but flexible enough to shift as the drama shifts; expanding to include the community cast, opening up to blur the line between the world of the play and the world of the audience. The pub becomes the nation, and the nation becomes the pub.
3. The play explores a community that has collectively disengaged from politics. What conversations or questions were you most interested in provoking in audiences through this story?
Honestly, what struck me most over three years of workshops wasn’t disengagement, it was the opposite. Everywhere we went, people had ideas. Specific, considered, passionate ideas about what wasn’t working and how it could be better. About NHS waiting times and what might actually help. About school funding and what teachers are up against. About the cost of housing and who it’s locking out. The disengagement from formal politics masked something much more alive underneath.
What I really wanted to bring into the play was that energy, the sense that change doesn’t have to wait for an external agent to arrive and sort things out. It can come from within a community. It often does. And alongside that I wanted to bring the solidarity I witnessed in those rooms. There’s a story we’re constantly told through social media and through the news about a country divided against itself, polarised beyond repair. That simply wasn’t my experience. In workshop after workshop, in prisons and schools and working men’s clubs and deaf communities, I found kindness. Curiosity. A genuine interest in other people’s experiences. I wanted that spirit to live in our pub.
So the conversations I hope audiences leave having are less about “Aren’t politicians awful?” and more about: “What would I say, if someone gave me the floor? What do I actually think needs to change? Who in my community is already doing something about it?” The play asks those questions not as an assignment but as an invitation.
4. This production brings together hearing and deaf performers and incorporates BSL, SSE, and creative captioning. How did accessibility influence your creative decisions, beyond simply being an added feature?
It reframed the whole project, in the best possible way. Working with deaf communities in Manchester and Birmingham during our research phase wasn’t a box-ticking exercise, it was genuinely formative. We learnt things about communication, about what it means to truly listen, about how it feels to live in a world where you are given no power or space to make the changes you need to live well, about the different ways a person can hold multiple linguistic and cultural identities at once, that fed directly into the writing and the staging.
When we brought a deaf actor into the rehearsal room at the National Theatre Studio early in the development, the question immediately became not “How do we include BSL?” but “How does this character’s experience of the world shape everything around her?” Accessibility wasn’t an add-on and a creative proposition. Mary, our deaf politician, ended up being in some ways the moral centre of the play. She’s the first politician in the drama who genuinely listens to her community. There’s something I find quietly radical about that: the character who moves between two languages, who has had to fight to be heard her whole life, is the one who actually hears people.
Captioning every performance and interpreting at least one of them at every stop in our tour isn’t separate from the artistic vision. It’s part of the same commitment – to make a show that speaks, in every sense, to everyone.
5. The idea of the public house as a civic space feels both nostalgic and urgent. What drew you to this setting as the heart of the story, and what does it represent to you today?
I’ve been thinking and creating work for a while now about what sociologists call third spaces – the places that are neither home nor work, neither fully private nor fully public, where you encounter people outside your immediate circle in a setting that still feels safe and recognisably yours. The squat. A dive bar. The townsquare. The pub. These are the spaces where communities actually form, not through grand civic gestures but through accumulated small interactions over time. And we’re losing them. As those spaces close or become unaffordable or simply fall out of the rhythms of people’s lives, we retreat into our own bubbles. Online. At home. Among people who already agree with us.
The pub felt like the perfect place to put that question under the light. It’s quintessentially English – locally inhabited but a national institution, carrying centuries of social and political life within its walls. And yet it’s also changing, disappearing, and in some ways has never fully belonged to everyone – there are plenty of people in 21st century Britain for whom the pub has never felt like their space. That tension interested me enormously. Who does the pub belong to? Who gets to feel at home there? What does it mean to reclaim it as a genuinely shared civic space?
And practically, it’s a wonderful place dramatically. Intimate and public at the same time. Full of music and confession and argument. A place where people say things they wouldn’t say anywhere else. What more could you want for a play?
6. With ‘Our Public House’ touring to different regions and incorporating local community participants at each stop, how do you anticipate the production evolving as it travels?
I think it will keep surprising us, and that’s exactly as it should be. Each city brings its own particular preoccupations, its own specific anxieties and ambitions, and the local ensemble members speak to those directly through the speeches they deliver on stage. Our professional cast respond to those speeches in character which means the drama genuinely shifts depending on what’s being said. A speech about social housing in Leeds lands differently from one about green spaces in Cornwall, and our characters have to meet it where it is.
What I’m most curious about is how the professional production will be changed by touring how the cast will be affected by spending time with communities in each place as they perform. We’ve always found that the workshops feed the work in ways you can’t predict or manufacture. Something about sitting in a room with people who have something real at stake in the questions the play is asking changes how you perform it. It grounds you. It reminds you what it’s all for.
By the time we reach London, ‘Our Public House’ will have been genuinely shaped by Leeds and Prescot and Coventry and Cornwall and Sheffield. It will carry all of those places with it. That feels right for a play about a country trying to understand itself.