“It came from a place of … what is the worst idea you could possibly have for a theatre show?” says director James Yarker, as he flicks through a heavily annotated 90-page copy of Birmingham city council’s three-year financial plan.
His latest production, All Our Money, is a 50-minute exploration of the complexities of council budgets, told with the help of 6,000 gold blocks and a football mascot.
“It felt like a topic which impinges on our lives a lot that we know very little about,” says Yarker. “And we have a history of taking complicated stuff and presenting it in an understandable way.”
Yarker is the artistic director of Birmingham-based Stan’s Cafe theatre company, operating out of an Edwardian school building in Selly Oak, which specialises in playful, quirky theatre shows.
Their most renowned production to date is Of All the People in All the World, which portrays human population statistics using grains of rice.
“I like exploring the unexpected, and helping people learn at the same time,” Yarker says. “Maybe the biggest success of this would be that people leave the show and think, wow, I’d love to learn more about that.”
All Our Money follows Bordesley, a giant teddy bear football mascot, on his first day as the unlikely new leader of Birmingham city council as he grapples with the £3bn annual budget.
The character was inspired by the real life H’Angus the Monkey, a football mascot who was elected as mayor of Hartlepool in 2002, serving three terms.
From entertaining football fans at half-time, Bordesley now has to make sure that potholes are filled, that care homes can afford tea time, and decide how much to charge for car parking.
“You could call it a farce,” Yarker says. “There’s humour in a naive person stepping into a world they don’t understand and trying to make sense of it.
“A huge amount of money arrives and [Bordesley] sets off deciding what to spend it on. But it turns out, actually, that’s all ringfenced by the government and has to go on education.”
As well as educating audiences on the reality of council budgeting, Yarker hopes the piece might help to humanise politicians in an age where they’re subjected to increasing levels of online abuse and violence.
“Ultimately the council are all citizens trying to do their best to run the city they live in,” he says. “Bordesley has a goal but he gets blown off course and has to deal with lots of demands. We play up the fact it’s a big challenge and people are trying their best.
“But you don’t hear any numbers or see any graphs. It’s all just bricks.”
For his research, Yarker read dozens of council documents and interviewed the city council’s leader, Ian Ward, for an insight into the stress of council budget setting.
“I think the council wants transparency. A lack of local engagement is a lack of democracy, isn’t it?,” Yarker says. “So anything that encourages people to engage with how our cities run is a good thing. The councillors have been very supportive.”
The piece is set to tour arts centres, micro-breweries, nightspots, community and leisure centres around Birmingham, but Yarker ultimately hopes the piece can become “like a pantomime” with a basic plot structure that can be transported around the country and adapted to individual local authorities.
They already have plans in the works for a Coventry version in November, and are going to work with students at Warwick university on a piece dramatising the university budget.
Yarker says: “It’s an unlikely premise but if we can prove to people that it is good fun and useful, then hopefully we can do it a load more.”
All Our Money is touring Birmingham from 27 February to 16 March
