Plays for a Poor Theatre – The Bread & Roses Theatre, London

Writer: Howard Brenton

Director: Connor Goodwin

Plays for a Poor Theatre, originally collected as Plays for the Poor Theatre, provides something of a showcase for its cast, allowing them the space to chop and change between multiple moderately absurd characters in each short piece. There are three pieces in total, bound together by a theme of slightly evil children, and so Ben Watts, Niamh Callan, and Alex Morgan-Edwards each lean clownwards in their performances to embody their inner child.

Driven by Jerzy Grotowski’s ideology, Brenton’s collection eschews complex theatrics or the need for set and props. Plays for a Poor Theatre stays true to that ideology. Everything is stripped back close to its bare minimum here. The direction is straightforward, with the odd, neat touch of a sheet for the sea.

By and large, though, Connor Goodwin’s direction serves to do what is necessary for the audience to be engaged. There are peculiar elements that do not work. Particularly, the stage directions spoken from the back of the audience. There really is no need for it, other than to emphasise what is already obvious from the stage. It is an unnecessary touch that stops the audience from being as engaged as they could be.

Nevertheless, Watts is a gleefully menacing toddler, Callan demonstrates a strong understanding of comic timing, and Morgan-Edwards’s physicality as a severed head is sickly funny. At times, the overuse of accents feels more like a showcase display rather than fairly warranted decisions on behalf of the characters.

There is something nice about reviving the type of theatre that was revolutionary in the 1960s. The type of theatre that thrives in a cost-of-living crisis. But the “Poor Theatre” conceptually has room to develop with time. As software and hardware have become much cheaper, it is no longer bourgeois theatre to utilise sound and lighting to substitute for expensive theatrical techniques. In this way, Plays for a Poor Theatre feels like it is rejecting elements of stagecraft that it has total access to in service of making a point that it does not need to.

Runs until 21 February 2026