Cardboard Citizens was founded in 1991, as a London Bubble project. For the first four years it toured Forum Theatre by homeless people to other homeless people, up and down the country, in hostels, day centres, arches, the street, conferences - you name it.
After Cardboard Citizens became an independent entity in 1995, the company broadened out into schools touring, as well as regular workshops, theatre visits, and large-scale site-specific collaborations. It is now a recognised contributor to the London theatre scene, providing opportunities for cultural explorations of all sorts to homeless and ex-homeless people - all without compromising its integrity and its allegiance to the oppressed.
An excerpt from the 2006/7 Cardboard Citizens Annual Review by founder and Artistic Director, Adrian Jackson
In the year 2006-7, the company celebrated, slightly belatedly, its fifteenth birthday. It is instructive to compare how Cardboard Citizens started out on this long journey, and its current state - what has changed, and what has remained the same. In the former category, the company is of course much larger in terms of staff, financial turnover and sheer quantity and variety of activities. In those early days we performed Forum Theatre plays in hostels - at first once a year, then twice a year - and held a single weekly workshop for all-comers. We could hardly have imagined then that 15 years later we would find ourselves completing our second major collaboration on equal terms with the much vaunted Royal Shakespeare Company.
What else has changed? Well, apart from the simple volume of activities we now provide, we have fulfilled a long-cherished ambition to be in a position to provide serious follow-up and support services to those we meet on our travels. Some three full-time staff are available to give learning and employment advice to our members; and yes, now we have members, with a full-time membership officer recruited from the ranks (as it were) to minister to their needs. This work will continue for at least the next two years, supported by a major scheme with London Development Agency. This side of our work has become integral to the company's mission, and those members of staff make a rich contribution to the success of all our projects.
And what has not changed? The ethos, which from the very beginning has been to make high quality theatre by, for, and with the most marginalised people in our society. Not just theatre where you sit and watch, but theatre where, whether Forum or Shakespeare, our audiences are drawn into the action by their common humanity, by their concern for the issues under debate.
Cardboard Citizens will continue to nurture the important relationships the past few years have brought us, with all the friends, new and old, who make the company what it is.
Onwards.
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