What audiences thought of the play

What Sinead Cusack thought of the play

Most of the cast had little or no acting experience, but with the inspired guidance of the artistic director Jimmy Fairhurst, they created a piece of radical theatre that is an angry response to the condition of the working class today. The show performed for two nights at the Salford Arts Theatre, two nights at the Nexus Cafe, Manchester and two nights at Calders Bookshop in London. The responses we got from the play suggests that there is a huge hunger out there for theatre to play a role in the political debates of our time.ed from a group of strangers, many of whom had never acted before, into The Ragged Collective, in little more than two months.

The play The Condition of the Working Class came together  in May and June 2012 in an intense period of discussion, writing and rehearsing. We met three nights a week and Saturday mornings as people juggled jobs, study, children and life in general as they volunteered their time and energy to make the play happen.