Guardian and Royal Court team up to present series of microplays

Katherine Parkinson in Britain Isn’t Eating, the first microplay collaboration between the Royal Court theatre and the Guardian. Photograph: Noah Payne-Frank

The Guardian and the Royal Court are collaborating on an unprecedented series of “microplays” which bring together journalism and the theatre, the first of which has been authored by Laura Wade, the award-winning writer behind Posh.
The filmed, five-minute plays, which will appear online over the next three weeks, unite Guardian writers with some of theatre’s most important playwrights and directors. Written at speed, filmed in a day and starring actors including Rafe Spall and Katherine Parkinson, the microplays are designed to be an extension of the Guardian’s journalism.
The project, entitled Off the Page, presents a state-of-the-nation portrait by responding to critical issues within six key areas of Guardian coverage: food, fashion, music, sport, education and politics.

Find out more about the microplays series

The series starts today with Britain Isn’t Eating, which is available to watch on theguardian.com from 12pm. It was written by Wade, whose play Posh – about a Bullingdon-style dining club – opened at the Royal Court in 2010 and was turned into the film The Riot Club.

Britain Isn’t Eating was created after conversations with the Guardian’s social affairs writer, Amelia Gentleman, and the food writer Jack Monroe, whose budget recipes are published in the Guardian.

The play satirises attitudes towards food poverty and the “feckless poor” while commenting on our obsession with reality TV. Parkinson (The IT Crowd, The Honourable Woman) stars as a politician who has made disparaging comments about the rise of food banks in her constituency. She learns an uncomfortable truth when she is called upon to cook a “store-cupboard”, food-bank meal live on air.

The play was directed by Carrie Cracknell, whose recent productions include Medea and Blurred Lines, both at the National Theatre, and features music by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory.

Later microplays in the series star Spall (Prometheus), Tobias Menzies (Game of Thrones) and
 Ruby Ashbourne Serkis (who will soon be seen in BBC One’s Cider With Rosie adaptation).

Also involved in the project are playwrights Robin French, Chloe Moss, Tim Price, Roy Williams and Rachel De-lahay, and directors Bijan Sheibani, Clint Dyer, Gbolahan Obisesan, Christopher Haydon and Hamish Pirie.

The Guardian journalists taking part include Aditya Chakrabortty, Hadley Freeman, Barney Ronay, Michael Rosen, Sally Weale, Richard Adams and John Harris, whose article on England’s identity crisis was an early inspiration for the project.

Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the Royal Court, said: “Playwrights and theatre-makers are continuously hungry for inspiration and challenge, and that is frequently found in the pages of our great newspapers. The journalistic instinct to speak truth to power, and uncover the previously uncovered, feeds directly into the Royal Court’s drive to say what has been unsaid and bring us to a deeper understanding of the world we live in. The form of our microplays, where theatre meets film in an inescapably theatrical setting, feels like a new adventure..”

The second microplay, on the subject of music, will be launched on Thursday. The remaining four films will appear online over the following fortnight and the full series will be screened at a Guardian Membership event at the Royal Court on Friday 5 December.