The Paper Birds Theatre Company

Based on interviews taken across the UK in 2014, multi award winning Leeds company The Paper Birds explore, with real life stories from the front line of poverty and debt, what it means to be broke in the visually stunning new production Broke.

This is a heartfelt and urgent look at the debt of a Nation from displaced families and gambling addictions to beans on toast. There are 13 million people in poverty in the UK and over half of these people are from working families. At Christmas 2013 the Red Cross started asking for food donations for the first time since World War II.

What happens when you have to resort to sex work to pay the bills, or try to give up dealing drugs only to end up at a food bank when the money dries up, too? What happens when you have to sell everything you own to buy enough petrol for a journey across the country to visit your parents, or when at 28 you can’t buy anything more than cheap white bread to eat in the supermarket?

Age suitability: 13 and over.