Do Drop Inn – Punters Pints and Politics by Sam Marlowe
Wed 29 Apr, 2026
Interview with Director Josephine Burton and Playwright Barney Norris on the upcoming new play by Dash Arts OUR PUBLIC HOUSE
What’s better than a night at the pub? Maybe a night at the theatre? Well, in Our Public House from Dash Arts, you can have both at once. The touring company’s new project, created over three years of research and workshopping, sets its state-of-the-nation action in a boozer, and integrates the real words and concerns of people from across England – some of whom will appear onstage. Every performance will be local; no two performances will be the same.
The play is written by award-winning playwright Barney Norris, and the pub at its heart is, aptly, called the Albion. Its landlady, Sanjana, played by Bharti Patel, is the motor of the action. “Sanjana is running a speechwriting club early doors in the pub, before punters come in for the open-mic night,” explains Josephine Burton, Dash Arts artistic director. “She’s had enough of the people feeling that they’re not heard, so she’s teaching them how to write and deliver speeches.” Dialogue is delivered alongside songs, composed by Jonathan Walton, with lyrics co-written by workshop participants from across the country. And every night throughout the play’s run, the audience will hear two speeches written and delivered by local people. “It will be a new ensemble every night,” enthuses Burton. “That’s amazing. So, all the way down the line, the whole process is really dynamic, and it’s constantly changing and evolving.”
The production, directed by Burton, aims to deliver its politics and pints with a potent chaser of fun. But there are meaty ideas here, too. “Dash Arts asks the big questions of our time and attempts to answer them over multi-year programmes of work, with artists, with academics, with participants, and with audiences,” says Burton. Post-Brexit, she detected a a fracturing of British UK identity, and became “interested in who we are in England today. What does it mean to be English?” Three years ago, that question prompted the beginning of a process in which Dash became involved in a speech-writing project, spearheaded by academic Alan Finlayson. It aimed to help people make and deliver speeches about issues they cared about – “things that they felt we could do today, that would make tomorrow better. And my instinct was, if we supported the project – went round the country, went into community centres, and deaf communities, and prisons, and schools, and worked with young activists in Sheffield, and in Coventry, and in Norwich, and in Cornwall, and in Prescot – we’d get a real picture of who we are as a country.”
Those early stages “coincided with the dying days of the last Conservative government. We were hearing people talk about cost of living, and mental-health crisis, and special-needs education, and social housing. I always knew we were gonna make a play of some sort. I just didn’t know what.” Inspiration struck when Burton realised that a local pub would make the perfect arena for those conversations. At that stage, she brought playwright Norris on board – and he had plenty of material to get his teeth into.
“I read 125 speeches before my initial workshop, and it was up to 200 by the time I delivered the first draft – and it’s kept growing,” Norris says. “So it’s kind of been a continual live document. This is my fourth play set in a pub. I love a pub play, because I think the complex dynamics of status, and home, and performance in those spaces, are wonderful metaphor territory – for society, and also the kind of toxicity and exclusionary-ness of pubs to some people, and the concept of welcome, the concept of a place you’re allowed to go in and get a glass of water, and not spend any money. And all the best stories happen around the fires.”
The creative process with Dash Arts also felt very natural for Norris. “It’s a really exciting collaborative culture clash. We’ve sustained the social-realist context that’s the basis for the majority of my work, and then, from time to time, we’ve exploded it – with music, or the public getting up onstage and speaking. So the play feels like this interesting meeting place of styles and languages, in the same way that society, of course, is also a meeting place.” Another influence, Burton reveals, was Shakespeare’s The Tempest.“Could the Albion be like Prospero’s island, and could our landlady be a version of Prospero, conjuring magic, bringing people into her world? And we’re touring to Shakespeare North, which feels appropriate.”
A major step for Norris, as a playwright, was that “this is a play that engages with big P politics. That’s a real new frontier. Obviously, all theatre is political, but I hadn’t done a play about a politician.” Coincidentally, he’d also decided to enter politics himself – standing for the Greens in his hometown of Salisbury in the 2024 election. “That was really fun – an opportunity to amplify the lessons and share them, because I never imagined a world in which I won the seat of Salisbury off the Tories,” he laughs. “But what I could do was to try and learn lessons about that process, and feed them into the wider discourse. And the play was so exciting in that context, a way to talk about all that.”
Political office might seem an unlikely career swerve for a playwright, and Norris cheerfully admits that it wasn’t particularly on his to-do list. “I did it partly because I’d been going along to the meetings of the local Green Party, and honestly, at that time, there were only two of us attending the meetings regularly who were still a working age. I’d only been in the area for a short time, so I wouldn’t normally have muscled in, but I thought, oh, go on. I’d love that. It was this amazing opportunity to tramp the streets and meet people. One of the secret privileges of it was that I revisited and reintegrated into the landscape of my youth, having not lived in Salisbury since I was 18 – you come back, you’re walking down every street you’ve been drunk underage on in your life. It was great.”
More seriously, he was struck, both on the doorstep and on the hustings, by the way politicians “have to pretend to listen in order to get a vote, and they will sort of half-promise some stuff or whatever. There’s an extraordinary fakeness around what they’re allowed to say. For example, the Labour manifesto had just 85 words on their agricultural policy – and that was what the Labour candidate was allowed to say. He didn’t have any other insight, and couldn’t answer any specific question. That was really interesting: to see the limits of language, the straitjacket of what an individual politician is allowed by head office to say.”
As a writer, Norris relished the colour and flavour of the environment: the Reform candidate was openly an admirer of Putin “which, in the city of Novichok, felt like a bold move”; also standing was the king of the Druids, Arthur Pendragon. But the most significant contribution to the plot of the play from his brief time in politics was the idea of a vote strike. “On election night, you have to look at every single spoiled ballot, and collectively agree that they are spoiled, and that they shouldn’t be counted. And there were hundreds more than usual at the last election. Many of them were penises drawn on the ballot, which turned out to be a campaign organised by a local anarchist who worked in a bar. That felt arresting to me. I thought, well, there’s something in the water, isn’t there? The rage and rejection that people feel towards mainstream politics was there, in those endless daubings on the ballot paper.”
That’s not, though, a symptom of disengagement, reckons Burton: “People are incredibly inspirational. if you give them an opportunity to speak, everyone has ideas about what we could do that would make things better, but they don’t feel heard. People feel politics is broken because the system does not enable change. It’s definitely not apathy.” And key to the play’s vision is the fact that the central politician character featured is Deaf. “We spent time in the Deaf community around the UK,” says Burton. “It was so powerful to hear what they felt, and to be able to provide a platform for those feelings and thoughts to be expressed, it was important for us to bring a Deaf actor into the room alongside a hearing cast.” The character is played by Gabriella Leon, “who helped us and gave us permission to build a Deaf character. And that the politician in our play is Deaf lends some irony to the fact that she is the first person to listen to the voices of the local community.”
There have been some unforgettable moments in the creation of a project so pertinent in its themes and so rich in its variety of lived experience. “The work that we’ve done in prisons has been unbelievable,” says Burton, describing the time members of the company spent at HMP Styal, a women’s prison just outside Manchester. “My heart went out for the women in the room, and they have inspired one of the characters in our play. These are people who are so silenced in society. It was very moving.”
For Norris, one of the most invigorating challenges was creating the character of a Reform councillor. “The arc of political Zeitgeist across the period that we’ve been making the show has mirrored the journey we’ve been on with that,” he says – and he felt it was essential to avoid approaching the character “from a place of demonisation and snobbery and dismissal. It’s such an incredibly prominent element of our contemporary politics. So I’ve really tried to articulate that empathetically from the inside out.”
“My process of writing is very much to be the characters, and I write out loud with my mouth, and then I write it down later. I just wander around the fields, talking to myself in their voice until they’re funny, you know? And so to become that person – coming from the modern urban Left – that felt like a stimulating adventure. I hope what we’ve done is write a person of great dignity and integrity, with real concerns and problems – but who is coming up with, to my mind, the wrong solutions for them.”
These are all undeniably meaty, important themes – but both Burton and Norris are keen to emphasise that Our Public House doesn’t feel like a lecture; it’s much more fun that. “It’s just really, really funny,” says Burton. “It’s a comedy. A really a good night out.” And crucially, it’s also relatable. “It’s a play about everywhere. Your place. Your local.”
