Who does a play belong to? Co-producing 'Our Public House'

In this blog, Josephine Burton shares the power of co-production to give people a voice and shape arts projects. Josephine Burton is Artistic Director of Dash Arts, a company that creates international artistic experiences that bridge divides across cultures and art forms. She is currently directing Our Public House, a new play with live music touring England this summer.

I’ve been making theatre for well over twenty years, but it was only when I started making Our Public House that I began to understand what co-production really means - not as a methodology or a framework, but as a fundamental question about who a piece of work belongs to.

The short answer, in this case, is to a lot of people. And that has made it better in every possible way.

Where it began: co-producing with academics

The project started with a conversation. In 2019, I met Professor Alan Finlayson, a political scientist at the University of East Anglia, at Latitude Festival, where Dash Arts had built a makeshift public forum - part town square, part debating chamber, part pub. We’d set up soapboxes and invited people to share speeches about what they’d change in the world. Alan wandered in and joined in. It was the beginning of a genuine research partnership.

Alan had a conviction I shared: that the tools of public speaking and political argument shouldn’t belong only to people with a certain kind of education. His colleague Professor Henriette van der Blom, a classicist who specialises in rhetoric (pursuasive speaking), agreed. Together, we applied to the Arts and Humanities Research Council (the UK’s main public body for funding arts and humanities research) for funding, with a shared aim: to find out whether giving people across England the skills and the space to make their voices heard could change anything - and what a theatre-maker might learn from that process.

This was co-production in the truest sense: two academics and an arts organisation bringing genuinely different expertise into a shared project, with no predetermined outcome. I thought a production might emerge from the research. But I didn’t know what the play would be. Neither did they. We were finding out together.

Co-producing with communities: 700 voices

The question we brought to every workshop was simple: what would you do today that could make tomorrow better? We worked with an extraordinarily wide range of people - in schools, in prisons including HMP Styal, with deaf communities in Manchester and Birmingham, on council estates, with political activists and with working men’s and women’s groups.

We came with a speech-making structure, teaching rhetoric (persuasive speaking) as a practical skill, but how we shared and supported it depended entirely on each group. Sometimes a long day, sometimes a few hours. Sometimes speeches were shared publicly; other times one-to-one. We worked with the Trades Union Congress to help their delegates prepare for a conference; with schools developing oracy (the ability to speak and listen). The format always followed the group’s needs, not ours.

We were always explicit about our intentions: participants were feeding a creative project, and there was an opportunity to be part of it further but only with their permission. We framed every session as a stand-alone, skills-based workshop. Travel expenses were covered; access support was provided for deaf communities and for transcription. The speeches were about what people wanted to change - not about extracting painful stories. We reminded participants throughout that they should only share what they felt comfortable sharing. In prison settings especially, facilitators actively supported participants to omit details that could jeopardise legal proceedings.

Over three years, more than 700 people wrote and delivered speeches. They spoke about NHS waiting lists, housing, mental health, the cost of living, loneliness, access to green spaces, the feeling of not being heard. The material was magnificent - specific, passionate and full of ideas that put most formal political debate to shame.

Crucially, we didn’t treat these communities as research subjects or as source material to be mined. We went back. We built relationships over years. At HMP Styal, for example, we’ve been returning annually since 2023. Our work there was embedded in the prison’s English language teaching programme so that participants gained qualifications equivalent to GCSEs through their work with us. Most recently, two of our professional actors joined us there, one of whom plays a character who has spent time in prison, so that the insights of those women could directly shape the performance. That kind of ongoing, reciprocal relationship is what separates genuine co-production from consultation.

We also documented the journey publicly as it unfolded, with participants’ consent - through a podcast series sharing the voices we were gathering rather than waiting to present a finished product at the end. That transparency felt important. It kept us accountable.

Co-producing the artistic work: writers, composers, actors

The next stage of co-production was making the play itself. Playwright Barney Norris and I worked collaboratively from the start - not with Barney writing a script and me directing it, but both of us in the room together from the earliest stages, with actors, shaping the world of the play.

We held two research and development weeks: one at the National Theatre Studio in London and one at HOME Manchester. Choosing a venue outside London for one of them was itself a co-production decision, we wanted the development process to happen in and with the North, not just to subsequently tour there. At each creative step, we also brought participants from our workshops into the rehearsal room, so that the people who had inspired the material could see and respond to what it was becoming.

We brought the speeches into the room with the actors and improvised. What the actors found - the characters they inhabited, the relationships they discovered - fed back into Barney’s writing. When we brought in our composer Jonathan Walton, we gave each fictional character a real speech that resonated with who they were, and he built their songs from those words. The music is co-produced from community voices.

Co-producing with audiences: a different show every night

The final layer of co-production happens in performance. At every venue on our tour, Leeds, Prescot, Coventry, Cornwall, Sheffield and London, a local community ensemble of eight people joins the professional cast of six on stage. They’ve been through our workshops. They’ve written their own speeches. They deliver two live each night, on the issues that matter most to them where they live.

Our professional cast respond to those speeches in character so the drama shifts depending on what is said. In Leeds it sounds like Leeds. In Coventry it sounds like Coventry. No two performances are the same, and that is not a side effect. It is the whole point.

The staging itself also changes: some theatres are end-on, some in horseshoe configurations, and we have adapted the production for both - so the physical space each community inhabits shapes how the story is told.

What I’ve learnt

Co-production takes longer. It costs more to do properly. It requires a willingness to not know the answer at the start - uncomfortable when funders and venues want certainty.

The lessons feel universal, whether you’re co-producing a piece of theatre, a public service or a research project: build relationships before you need them. Be transparent about your intentions from the start. Meet people where they are, not where it’s convenient for you. And understand that consent is ongoing, not a box ticked at the beginning.

But what co-production produces is irreplaceable. The play is better because of the 700 people whose voices are in it. The performances are richer because actors spent time with the communities they depict. The show is different every night because it is in genuine conversation with the place it is playing in - shaped by those who actually live there.

And perhaps most importantly: the work belongs to more people. When someone in the audience recognises their own experience on stage, or when a community participant steps into the lights to deliver their speech, the question of who the play belongs to answers itself.

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Our Public House is at Marylebone Theatre, London, from 30 June to 4 July 2026. For tickets and more information visit dasharts.org.uk/our-public-house. The full Our Public House podcast series is available at dasharts.org.uk/ourpublichouse-podcastseries

Our Public House is produced by Dash Arts in association with Leeds Playhouse and supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Further support comes from Deborah Loeb Brice Donor Advised Fund at CAF, Three Monkies Trust, Marchus Trust, Thistle Trust, 29th May 1961 Foundation, BeauxArtz, Unity Theatre Trust, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the National Theatre’s Generate programme, and the Albion Giving Circle.

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Photo of Josephine Burton by Ikin Yum

Photo from production of ‘Our Public House’ by Pamela Raith Photography

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