We sat down with Christine Bacon, playwright of A Fine Idea and co-Artistic Director of ice&fire.
A Fine Idea asks some deeply challenging questions about aid, power and good intentions. What first drew you to bringing this story to the stage?
The inspiration for the play was reading Jason Hickel’s book THE DIVIDE. Reading it confronted me with my own lack of awareness about why such vast inequality exists between the Global North and the Global South. Jason previously worked in the international development field and was a passionate believer in the narrative of aid as the solution to such inequality, but once he started digging, this belief was shaken to its core. I wanted to explore that journey with an audience.
As an Artistic Director, how do you balance creating politically urgent theatre while still ensuring audiences feel emotionally connected and engaged?
I have always been interested in how the actions or inactions of governments can profoundly affect the lives of ordinary people. Politics, for me, is a deeply emotional subject. It can fundamentally transform all of our lives for the better or for the worse. As an artist exploring these themes, ensuring audiences feel connected to the human beings at the centre of these stories is key. With A FINE IDEA, the creative team have also had a lot of fun playing with form and style so that the themes we explore come to life in a theatrically engaging way for the audience.
The production features both established performers like Grace Saif and emerging talent such as Ella Bryant. What has it been like bringing this ensemble together?
The cast is incredible. I am so excited for audiences to witness what they are bringing to this play. Charlotte Westenra, who is directing, is a marvel. Being in a rehearsal room with artists of this calibre is a playwright’s happy place. As well as bringing the piece together, we have also been collectively engaging with the arguments and the themes of the play. Much of the action of the play takes place in Kenya in June 2024 during the Gen Z uprising there which saw huge numbers of (mostly) young Kenyans taking to the streets to demand an end to the austerity their government and institutions like the IMF and World Bank were imposing on them During the rehearsal period, as a team we have been meeting with activists and academics to help us gain a deeper understanding of these events, which has hugely informed the team’s approach to the material.
ice&fire has long been known for theatre that engages with social and political issues humanly. How does A Fine Idea reflect the company’s wider mission?
At ice&fire, what gets us out of bed in the morning is working for a world where human rights matter. A FINE IDEA engages with Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – ‘Everybody has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family …’ This is arguably, by far, the most under-fulfilled human right of them all, affecting billions of our fellow human beings. Rather than focusing on isolated cases of injustice and human rights violations, this play looks at human rights more expansively and draws our attention to the structural drivers of such an extreme status quo, in which 8 billionaires control as much wealth as the poorest 50% of humanity, an unprecedented statistic.
What conversations do you hope audiences leave the theatre having with themselves afterwards?
I hope audiences have new questions about the persistence of extreme poverty in the Global South and our government’s role in how and why it persists. They may ask themselves why we have prioritised the easy work of charity over the harder work of justice? What does ‘changing the world’ actually mean, and how can I make different choices about how I do that in my own life and work?