E15

Twenty-nine single mothers receive eviction notices on the same day. Their housing options weren’t great to begin with: the Focus E15 Hostel provided single rooms to them and other young people in Newham, where boilers would burst and rats would scurry down the hallways, and they were told not to make friends – other people here were trouble.

But it was a place to live. And now the council has said they will no longer fund their places. And 29 single mothers are faced with negotiating private rents; or being moved out of London.

E15 is a passionate piece of verbatim theatre looking at the housing crisis through the eyes of three young mothers. Part performance, part rally, all activism, this is theatre that yells in your face.

This new production is still finding its feet. There is a difficulty in verbatim theatre discerning where the artists have placed the line between artistic choice and journalism, and occasionally it feels like here they have pushed the character of the community activist too far towards being played for laughs. This undercuts both the tension in the work and the moments of humour we are allowed to see in the young mothers.

But if a little work still needs to be done to help E15 find its shape, the work is still a powerful piece of political theatre, that asks its audience what sort of a country do they want to live in? And what are we going to do to make it happen?