I’ve worked with Cardboard Citizens over about the last eight years, writing various commissions and teaching their Writing for Forum course with artistic director Adrian Jackson.

My current play Benefit is a set of three forum plays that tours hostels, prisons and arts centres through to mid June of this year. Forum theatre – invented by the Brazilian theatre-maker, theorist and activist Augusto Boal – is a means of better understanding ourselves and how we fit into the worlds around us and, most importantly, how we might consequently change those worlds.

Writing a forum play is very different from writing a more traditional play. The plays themselves are really only the first half of the evening, the second half given over to the ‘forum’ – a sort of debate where the audience try to change the outcome of one of the plays for the better.

This process naturally affects the structure of the plays – which always take their protagonists on a downward trajectory, revealing the issues and oppressions the protagonist is subject to. It also means that the plays need to have ‘intervention points’, moments where the audience can see that the protagonist has choices and that change is possible.

In addition to the plays and the forum, there is a Joker – a person who moves between the drama and the audience, diminishing the gap between them by catalysing debate and empowering the audience. Because in forum the audience are also performers – ‘spect-actors’ as Boal called them who, in addition to debating the drama, will get up and take the part of the protagonist in order to create that better outcome.

Our current production BENEFIT looks at the recent benefit reforms and current poor working conditions, exploring issues around benefit sanctions, zero hours contracts and Personal Incapacity Payments.

Much of my work involves a large amount of research, often in the form of story gathering from people with lived experience of the issues I’m exploring. For this project, my research process involved development days with Cardboard Citizens members, plenty of reading, conversations – both with those who have struggled in the system’s Kafkaesque clutches and those who have left their Jobcentre jobs to escape those same clutches. While none of the plays are a single person’s story, all of the plays tell a combination of true stories and are all based on fact.

The plays look at how austerity measures are impacting on the vulnerable in society.

Compared to other developed countries, the UK now has a very unequal distribution of income. Wealth inequality has risen four times faster in the seven years since the 2008 financial crash than in the seven years before. The rich in the UK are becoming richer faster than ever.

Meanwhile, household debt has risen to record levels and almost a million people visited a food bank in the UK last year. In a consumer society where people are assessed according to their income, how they spend it and what they do with their time, having very little leaves people isolated and socially excluded.

What has been most shocking to me over the last twelve months, is how often stories like the ones BENEFIT tells crop up in the media. Once you start looking out for them, you realise that they’re a daily occurrence.

Benefit seeks to create solidarity among those who have been made to feel like lesser human beings by the reforms and the attendant media coverage about ‘scroungers’, and also to give those without recent lived experience of the benefit system a window on the current state of that world.

Benefit is showing at the Old Fire Station, Oxford on 5th May. To book your tickets please visit www.oldfirestation.org.uk/event/benefit