The Cockpit | 24th – 27th June

‘THE LIBERTY TREE’

Following a sell-out run in Bath in May 2015, The Liberty Tree will play at The Cockpit theatre in London from Wednesday 24^th – Saturday 27th June.

Written and directed by TV & theatre actor, writer and director, Chris Jury, best known for playing Eric Catchpole in the BBC’s antique classic, Lovejoy and directing over 50 episodes of Eastenders, The Liberty Tree is a rebellious, feel-good, jukebox musical for anyone sick of being overworked, underpaid and powerless. It is a hilarious, up-lifting satire on modern Britain.

“I wrote the play as a response to what I perceive as a crisis of political education in the UK”, says Jury. “Many young people have not even the flimsiest notions of how we got to be supposedly free citizens in a free country, let alone that it is possible to resist the exploitation they are all too aware they are experiencing in the workplace.”

Rosa is a young woman working in a Call Centre (the electronic sweatshops of the 21st Century). She witnesses a manager cruelly bullying a colleague but does nothing. A fellow worker, Joe, does intervene and is sacked. That night Rosa is tormented by her cowardice in the face of such injustice. As she sleeps she dreams and when she awakes she is trapped in the grotesque, The Land Of Do What You’re Told. She soon discovers that the only way out of this land of obedience and subservience is to go on a journey to find The Liberty Tree…

The show is performed by students and young activists and is an inspiring night out for all lefties, radicals, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists and fellow travellers.

The Liberty Tree is deliberately aimed at these young people, students and young trade unionists, and is an attempt to address this failure of education but not through lectures and textbooks, but through the vehicle of a large-scale musical which uses drama, music and comedy to demonstrate the political realities of how power is expressed and to extol the virtues of collective political action as a response of the powerless to the abuses of the powerful.

“I love it’s honesty and energy” Nicholas Kent, Founding Director of the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn.

“What we have here is a great bit of old-fashioned Agitprop; a Socialist panto – Wizard of Oz rewritten by William Morris and Ewan MacColl.” Mike Bradwell, Founder of Hull Truck.

TWITTER- @LibertyTree_

FACEBOOK – https://www.facebook.com/thelibertytreemusical

Booking Information

Cockpit Theatre
Gateforth Street | London | NW8 8EH