Output details

The condition of the working class

A documentary feature film inspired by Friedrich Engels' 1844 book 'The Condition of the Working Class In England'. The film asks how much has really changed since 1844? The power relations in our society remain essentially the same. As a result working class people rarely get to tell their own stories. Their stories are told for them by people who have no experience of being working class. The consequences of this, politically, socially and culturally, are far reaching and devastating. As a way of exploring this, the documentary follows the making of a theatrical show by non-professionals which has 8 weeks to write and devise a show for public performance drawing on the participants' own experiences and linking them back to Engels' classic text. The film follows the group from first rehearsal to first night and links their struggle to get the performance on stage to the broader struggles of the working class today.

‘The Condition of the Working Class’ is a ground-breaking feature-length documentary that enables a group of working class people to tell their own stories, demonstrating the continued importance of class inequalities in contemporary Britain. Inspired by Friedrich Engels’ classic ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844’, the project gives its participants a unique opportunity to articulate their own experience and provides a context within which to recognize the legitimacy of their identities, recovering their collective experience and memory from its marginalisation within the existing public sphere. They are enabled to engage in a form of cultural production that fosters their creativity and imagination in a manner unavailable in mainstream media.

The film is a research-through-practice enterprise that began with the directors issuing a public call for a group of non-professionals from the working class in Manchester and Salford to come together to write a play based on a combination of Engels' book and their own experiences. Wayne and his co-director worked with a hired artistic director to help develop the theatrical performance. The documentary follows the process of theatrical production from first rehearsal to first-night performance. This is enhanced by archive footage (providing historical context) and interviews with people from the local area, who are asked about their lives in austerity Britain and their responses to Engels’ words.

The project constitutes a significant contribution to documentary, both in its form and in demonstrating continuities between the context in which Engels wrote and a contemporary period that has witnessed a ‘retreat from class’ in political discourse and academic research. The film achieves its goals through a participatory-observational methodology and an original collaboration between film and theatre, offering a subversion of the limitations of the prevailing mainstream ‘Reality TV’ paradigm.

Website: www.conditionoftheworkingclass.info