Inside These Are Our Neighbours at Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre

On May 13, 2021, on Kenmure Street in Glasgow’s Southside, immigration enforcement officers detained two local residents inside a transport van. Within minutes, their neighbours surrounded the vehicle in an impromptu act of civil disobedience that blossomed into an eight-hour standoff. By late afternoon, encircled by hundreds of citizens who refused to disperse, Police Scotland ordered the two men released back into the crowd.

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This autumn, that intervention takes to the stage at the Citizens Theatre in These Are Our Neighbours, a documentary dance-theatre work produced by Scottish new writing company RUPTURE, co-produced with physical laboratory theatre company Company of Wolves and artist Katharine Williams, in association with Bijli.

Translating a neighbourhood protest into a stage piece presents a significant challenge: the day’s central action was largely static, defined by people sitting down. Yet for Williams, who wrote the text and serves as lead artist, movement was an essential component from the initial concept. “The complexity of feelings for anyone who has ever had their future in the hands of the Home Office, and the extremes of emotion for everyone who was there that day are so huge that trying to articulate them only with words just doesn’t work,” Williams explains.

Rather than attempting a literal reenactment, the piece uses choreography and visual staging to externalise the emotional and psychological undercurrents of the day.

The Ethical Weight of Verbatim Testimony

Because the production draws directly on living participants residing in the immediate neighbourhood, the creative team established strict boundaries around how those voices were handled. Williams constructed the script from published accounts and extensive interviews with residents who formed the blockade, making the editing process an exercise in fidelity rather than artistic license.

“When someone gives me, as a writer, the gift of sharing my experience with them, I have a responsibility to honour their words as truthfully as possible, both in the writing, and in the work the team and I do in the room,” Williams states. To prevent the piece from becoming romanticised, Williams placed clear limits on interpretive embellishment: “The important thing here is that I don’t get to put my spin on them. We’ve spent a lot of time in rehearsal trying to ensure that we don’t put extra meanings that weren’t there into people’s words.”

Preserving that complexity was central to the work of associate director Shilpa T-Hyland, whose background with Bijli focuses on diaspora narratives in contemporary Scotland. Kenmure Street brought together a varied cross-section of people—from Muslim elders and local families to trade unionists and youth activists.

“For me, it’s about not oversimplifying, letting contradicting voices exist in the same space,” T-Hyland says. That meant ensuring the script reflected the unglamorous realities of street-level direct action alongside the collective triumph. “Being at a protest like this is a long day, and the crowd go through all kinds of different moments from excitement, solidarity, fear and of course boredom.” By tracking the day through three central lenses, the production preserves the friction within the assembly: “This is the story of a crowd that came together and achieved something amazing, but that doesn’t make the individual voices in the crowd any less distinct.”

Directing Memory and Latent Threat

Director Ewan Downie, joint artistic director of Company of Wolves, brought a firsthand sensory memory to the rehearsal room: he was in the crowd on Kenmure Street that morning. While that presence provided “a felt sense of what it was like that I can draw on,” Downie was careful not to privilege his own perspective above the documented accounts. “The joy of this play is that it makes space for a multiplicity of voices and experiences,” he notes. “My memories, my take on that day, just become part of a kaleidoscopic whole.”

Staging the event through laboratory theatre techniques meant finding physical equivalents for collective stillness. “Katharine wrote the piece as a dance-theatre performance for a reason,” Downie observes. “Dance can express the inner experiences of that day, the joy and fear and solidarity that was bubbling under the surface of what was essentially a lot of people standing or sitting about.”

Equally crucial was avoiding the dramatic pitfall of retrospective certainty. While the day is remembered as a peaceful resolution, the standoff carried an ongoing threat of state escalation. “The interesting thing is that this is a play in which almost nothing bad happens,” Downie says. “There were some people who got hurt that day, there were people who got arrested, but the whole situation could have gone so seriously wrong at so many points. There’s an alternative-reality version of this story, where the police come in with horses and riot gear, and that could actually have happened at any point. Although that didn’t happen, we keep that possibility alive throughout the show.”

Embodying the Word: Technique and Politics

Bringing this verbatim material to life on stage falls to a three-strong ensemble: Umar Butt, Leticia Sánchez, and Adam Tompa. Each brings a distinct technical background—spanning community-rooted new writing, contemporary movement, and physical laboratory performance.

For Tompa, performing verbatim testimony demanded an analytical entry point. “Any dramatical text demands deep analytical understanding as a starting point, regardless of style, toolbox or whether it’s fictional or documentary,” Tompa explains. “With this, I am to believe that all these events could have happened to me—that is how I try to join and stand shoulder to shoulder with those in the auditorium who were actually part of that victorious day.”

A central challenge for the performers was navigating the friction between spoken testimony and physical exertion. Because “listening to a text requires full focus from the audience—and so does the movement sequences,” Tompa notes that the production relies on structured pacing: “It is simply more useful to alternate them, create a pattern and let them affect one another and take advantage of the emerging dialogue within the two.”

For Tompa, a European artist based in Scotland, the subject matter intersects with contemporary British politics. “After 14 years of UK residency, I recently started to feel a bit uneasy about this gradual but recognisable turn toward the far-right in British politics—and in the general public alike,” he reflects. He views the production as a confrontation with complacency: “Scotland, as an esteemed society, has no more time to turn a blind eye to the problem, saying this happens far away, this doesn’t affect us. If we won’t unify, push back and take a stand loud and clear for the diverse values of this great nation, we won’t be able to stop the steamroller of radicalisation within our communities either.”

The Mechanics of the Room and Non-Literal Light

The production’s working method was shaped by Williams operating simultaneously as playwright and lead lighting designer. To ensure the physical choreography and spoken text could settle before technical rehearsals began, the creative team implemented an early script freeze. Williams finalised the text at the conclusion of the rehearsal block, allowing the performers to “‘get the words into their bodies’ at the same time as the movement” without the disruption of late rewrites at the lighting desk.

Within this environment, T-Hyland served as an objective sounding board. “I suppose in some ways I’m a bit of an outside eye being fresher to the material,” T-Hyland notes. “Sometimes that means asking the obvious questions, almost being the first audience. It’s also about being supportive generally, and that differs from day-to-day.”

On the technical side, assistant lighting designer Louise Chan supported Williams’ dual focus, utilising the visual directions embedded in the script to construct the lighting plot. “You’ve got to acknowledge that’s a lot on one person’s plate,” Chan says. “The groundwork done at the scripting stage will greatly inform the lighting design when it’s our turn… with Katharine being the living, breathing version of the script, the decisions we have to make later down the line should hopefully be a breeze.”

The design avoids trying to recreate the flat, overcast daylight of a Glasgow morning, opting instead for a responsive visual framework. “The story being told is a real one, but it’s represented and fused with a set and lights that would get a poor mark if we were going for realism,” Chan explains. The lighting shifts between intimate text-led scenes and dynamic dance sections, reflecting ideological and emotional polarities: “Berating police officers on one hand and asking ‘is it alright to be calling them pigs?’ on another. Seeing the fear of leaving the comfort of one’s own home versus the kind of happiness achieved by being part of a community.”

Returning the Narrative to the Southside

Rather than premiering in isolation, the production has maintained ties with the neighbourhood that generated it. During the final rehearsal week, the company will host an open rehearsal at the Pollokshields Community Centre, inviting participants from the 2021 protest to see the work and share food with the creative team before the production opens in the Citizens Theatre Studio.

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For Williams, that community accountability remains the baseline for the entire project: “Throughout the journey of making These Are Our Neighbours, people who were at the protest have been central. Everything in the script is true, and comes either from interviews or published testimonies. This show owes its existence to the community that came together that day. It is their story, and it is our privilege to tell it.”

Featured Image: TAON_14Aug26_photo Brian Hartley

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These Are Our Neighbours runs at the Citizens Theatre Studio, Glasgow, from Wednesday 14 to Saturday 17 October 2026. For tickets and schedule details, visit https://citz.co.uk/whats-on/these-are-our-neighbours/.