2024: CELEBRATING 60 SHOWS IN EIGHT COUNTRIES /  by Jeremy Goldstein

In 2024 we celebrated our Canadian premiere and 60th performance event with a live broadcast direct from Vancouver. The broadcast as part of Chutzpah! Festival capped an extraordinary twelve months during which we made our US debut at Lincoln Center New York, won an Adelaide Fringe Award for Best Theatre, played Newcastle City Hall as part of the ever inventive New Annual Festival north of Sydney, and developed our new interconnecting theatre project ‘This Is Who I Am’ with British High Commission and Market Theatre Johannesburg, and staged a new edition of the work with West Darling Arts at Broken Hill City Art Gallery in Far West New South Wales.

As we enter our eighth year, I want to express my deepest gratitude to all our courageous participants, some of whom have never spoken up in public before - your untold stories of loss, hope and resistance are the ones we want to see on our stages. I also want to acknowledge our artistic team including theatre director Jen Heyes who has been with the project since 2016, and to newer collaborators including photographers Cassandra Hannagan and Em Jensen, theatre director Anne-Louise Rentell, and artist Flick Harrison who as video director oversaw the live broadcast from Canada. None of this could have happened without the commitment of our venues, partners and funders, so I want to say a massive thanks to you too.

To mark an incredible year we want to share some images of the past twelve months, and to remind you that in 2025, we will be presenting work in Melbourne, Canberra, Johannesburg and more.

We’d also like to share this Backstage Blog which was recently published by Theatre Works in Melbourne - Australia’s epicentre of independent theatre.

Theatre Works - In Conversation with Jeremy Goldstein | Truth to Power Cafe

In this week's Backstage Blog, we chat with Jeremy Goldstein about the creation of their upcoming production, Truth to Power Cafe, opening at Theatre Works Wednesday 5th February.

Q. What should audiences expect when they come to see Truth to Power Café?

A: Truth to Power Café is a 60 min theatre show in which I take the audience on a poetic journey through time, place and community. It begins with my father in 1950’s post-war London, to me becoming HIV+ in 1999 and into the present day. My story, which I tell through memoir, image, film, poetry, and music frames short monologues of compassionate truth-telling from community participants rising up in response to the question at the heart of the show ‘who has power over you and what do you want to say to them?’.

In advance of each performance, we cast up to 10 participants of all ages, experiences and backgrounds, so no single performance is ever the same. The format of the show is that every person has the space to speak their truth to power, and there is no commentary or questioning from the audience. Words including my own, are participants' to proclaim, unchallenged.

Part performance, memoir and impassioned activism - this long-term project of gathering, then detonating articulate voices of dissent has produced a singular blend of inspiring activist theatre.

 Q. If Truth to Power Café had a Spotify Wrapped, what would be on it?

A: The music of David Bowie has topped my list since records began. Deeper cuts such as Word on a Wing, Eight Line Poem, and Teenage Wildlife would all be on it along with his immortal Heroes, a version of which is included in the show itself.

Among the many joys of having my own show is that I get to spend inordinate amounts of time creating playlists for our pre-show soundtrack. My last two shows in Vancouver and Newcastle (New Annual) have included Sweet Sounds of Heaven by The Rolling Stones, Baltimore by Prince, and Super Rich Kids by Frank Ocean.

Only one track has survived all sixty of our pre-show playlists, and that's Pictures of You by The Cure. If you want to know why, read the lyrics and see the show

Q. What has inspired you to create this work?

A: Before I made Truth to Power Café, I spent 25 years working internationally as a queer theatre producer. In 2002, I set up London Artists Projects to commission and present genre-busting interdisciplinary performance work with artists including Penny Arcade. Before that I was a founder member of ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power) in Melbourne in the early 90’s, and saw first-hand how the movement which changed the face of health care for AIDS and HIV+ people world-wide, made every day people feel like heroes in their own lives.

Jump forward to 2013 when my father died. His death triggered a rigorous enquiry into our fractured relationship, during which I learned a lot about myself, and the nature of power, and occupation of the mind. It was that inquiry that sparked the creation of Truth to Power Café, and set me on a path towards truth and reconciliation.

My father was Mick Goldstein. He grew up with Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter and became the source for a number of Pinter characters. Harold and Mick met each other in East London in 1947 and together with their life-long friend Henry Woolf, became known as Harold’s inner circle called The Hackney Gang. For sixty years The Hackney Gang maintained their belief in speaking truth to power, and remained firmly on the side of the occupied, the disempowered and their allies. It is these people I invite to voice untold stories of loss, hope and resistance as part of performances which have become love letters to the memory of my father Mick and his friends of sixty years Henry Woolf and Harold Pinter.

Q. What would you want audiences to take away after seeing Truth to Power Café?

A: A renewed sense of love, hope and compassion.  

Q: What has been the most memorable moment throughout the creation / rehearsal process?

A: Just before my father died, a life time of letters between my father, Henry and Harold were acquired by the Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library in London.

Reading the letters as I did in the early stages of the creation process, enabled me to meet my father as he was as a young man in the 1950’s. We never know our parents when they’re that age, so it had a profound effect on me. I discovered that he wanted to be a writer but his sense of pride prevented him from risking failure in front of his best friends, one of whom just happened to be one of the great British playwrights of the 20th century.

I then started to work with Henry Woolf who became my mentor and wrote the poetry I perform in the show directed by one of UK’s leading theatre directors Jen Heyes. Known as the King of the Avant Garde - Henry worked with all the greats including Peter Brook, Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson. He also appeared in the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Sadly Henry died in 2021 aged 87 but he continues to connect the work to a lost world and his legacy lives on in the show, which I’ve now created multiple times in eight countries with over eight hundred participants.

In November I celebrated my 60th performance event with a live broadcast from Vancouver, and in February I will finally land the show in Melbourne at Theatre Works as part of Midsumma.

We're bringing all the Queer Power we can muster to Melbourne and I couldn’t be happier.

Personal, professional, political, Truth to Power Café is now seeking participants of all ages, experience and backgrounds to speak their truth to power at Theatre Works on 5-6 February. To sign up and take part click here. To book tickets to the live show click here.

Total Theatre: Speaking truth to power /  by Jeremy Goldstein

Jeremy Goldstein performing Truth to Power Café as it opens 2021 MELT Festival of Queer Arts and Culture at Brisbane Powerhouse, Australia.  Photo: Kate Holmes

Speaking truth to power

Jeremy Goldstein of London Artists Projects reflects on how exploring his personal biography and family history led to the creation of an internationally lauded project, Truth to Power Café, and then to the newly launched venture, This Is Who I Am

Seven years ago I ventured forth into the Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library in London to read private letters between my late father Mick Goldstein and his best friends, poet Henry Woolf and Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter – who with Jimmy Law, Moishe Wernick and Ron Percival became known as the Hackney Gang.  

Spurred on by theatre director Jen Heyes, I began a life-changing journey that would eventually result in the creation of our internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary performance event Truth to Power Café, and a new digital theatre project This Is Who I Am, which will open at the end of this month (April 2022) with British Council at the National Libraries in Singapore.

At the time I had no idea what I might find in those letters, and nor did I know that they would pave the way for my transition from producer to writer, performer, and artist.  

I knew of their existence because my father had shown them to me with pride on a trip to Australia in 2012. Perfectly preserved in their original envelopes, stamps from the 1950s intact, these were long letters bound by their love of Beckett and passion for cricket. They were acquired by the British Library just before my father died in 2013, and remain on public record as part of the Pinter Archive.

Jump forward to 2015 and I had just re-established my long-time production company London Artists Projects (LAP) which I’d set up in 2002. The company, which folded for a time in 2010 due to a lack of funds, is now celebrating its twentieth anniversary. Genre-busting work which I’d struggled to produce for over a decade had finally come home to roost under the umbrella of LAP. Past lives and experiences – the people, places, projects, and memories that made up LAP’s back catalogue of artist projects – had finally been laid to rest. For the first time in my life, I was debt free. I didn’t owe anything to anyone, and the coast was clear for a new theatrical adventure, which I wanted to produce under the aegis of LAP mark II. 

Poet Henry Woolf of the Hackney Gang and Jeremy Goldstein, 2016, London. Photo: Darren Black

I remember my first official day at the British Library only too well. I arrived, like an immigrant at what felt like the border to an uncharted land. I was greeted by a lovely old queen from Brazil, and with a wink and a smile I was through and began to make my way to the Manuscripts Room.  

On my way I stumbled upon the Treasures of the British Library exhibition. To my left were original scores from Handel, Beethoven, Elgar, and Debussy. In the corner was Jane Austen’s writing desk and next to that was the original manuscript for Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens, and handwritten poems by Oscar Wilde. But the real find was exhibit No.19. Situated in a glass case in amongst handwritten lyrics by Lennon and McCartney (to ‘Help’, ‘Ticket to Ride’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’) lay a single letter with its own plaque:

No.19: Letter from Harold Pinter to Mick Goldstein, 1955:

‘In 2014, the British Library announced the acquisition of a collection of over 100 letters from Harold Pinter to two of his childhood friends, Mick Goldstein, and Henry Woolf. Written in Pinter’s late teens and twenties, the letters candidly discuss his early playwriting… and his interest in a new unknown writer – Samuel Beckett.’

The letter on display began and ended as their letters always did: ‘Dear Mick… love Harold’. Four words, written countless times, which now frame a sixty-year friendship defined by an enduring capacity for mateship, during which they maintained the intellectual excitement of their youth, and shared discoveries. In their later politically active years, they maintained their belief in speaking truth to power, and remained firmly on the side of the occupied and the disempowered and their allies. They also believed passionately in the existence of an independent media.

As I began to comb through the archive, I discovered the original typescript of Pinter’s one and only novel, The Dwarfs. The novel, which was written in the 1950s and eventually published in the 1990s, was described by Pinter’s biographer and former Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington as holding the key to all Pinter’s later plays. The protagonist, Len, is based on my father Mick. In one scene Len says, ‘I’ve never been able to look in the mirror and say this is who I am’. When I read that line for the first time, I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was all the evidence I needed of my father’s insecurities and lack of fulfilment that got expressed through our difficult relationship, in the form of the power he held over me for so long. There it was laid bare, the truth of his lived experience captured with pinpoint accuracy by his best friend, Harold Pinter.

Truth to Power Café, digital theatre edition for Bunjil Place, 2021, Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Graham Denholm

It’s an insight which did not escape the view of Sarah Schulman, celebrated US novelist and founder of the ACT UP Oral History Project in New York. I had brought Sarah to London in 2015 as part of a series of talks I curated for Penny Arcade’s Longing Lasts Longer at Soho Theatre, and again in 2019 with Dan Glass and ACT UP London (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). I had also attended the early meetings of the Melbourne chapter of ACT UP in the 1980s, and saw first-hand how the movement, which changed the world, made everyday people feel like heroes in their own lives.

Sarah, with her characteristic rigour, was able to take these insights one step further with an acute observation of the work, describing it as ‘a conscious transformation of history into opportunity’. In those few words Sarah enabled me to see that in the benevolent shadows of the Hackney Gang and ACT UP, I was using the truth and the pain of my lived experience, to enable others to express theirs. The cycle of my inherited trauma had been broken forever and now, seven years on, LAP and its signature project Truth to Power Café, developed and directed by Jen Heyes – who is Liverpool based and working-class – has become the crucible for nearly six hundred stories from people of all ages, experiences, and backgrounds in six different countries, to talk back to those that try to stop them. 

The question at the heart of the project – ‘who has power over you and what do you want to say to them?’ – is conceived to challenge notions of power and give a voice to people who don’t normally have a chance to speak out. People from marginalised communities tend to want to talk about progressive change, whereas those with privilege and power want to maintain the status quo and have more power. For me personally, it’s often the most personal stories that I find the most effecting, especially from first-time speakers and those who are potentially the more vulnerable voices from within our midst. But above and beyond the politics, we at LAP remain resolute in our belief that everyone has their own unique story to tell, and all are plays-in-waiting.

In the UK alone, Jen and I have toured the show all through the north of England. We’ve gone out of our way to reach people and participants we often only ever see depicted in the films of Ken Loach. We find our participants in close collaboration with each of our venues. It’s a process which normally takes about three months to realise, and even then, with resources as they are, we only ever meet our participants on the day of each performance as part of a 90-minute photo call and rehearsal in advance of the 60-minute show.

Jeremy Goldstein performing in Truth to Power Café as part of the arts and culture programme for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, Australia.  Photo: Kate Holmes

I’m also cast as a participant. I tell my story through a combination of memoir, image, film, music, and art. My story begins with the tale of the Hackney Gang, a celebration of Harold Pinter, Henry Woolf, and my father Mick Goldstein.  

Bejewelled with the original poetry of Henry Woolf himself, the show opens in a post-war East London at a time when the Jewish avant-garde of the Hackney Gang discovered artists like Samuel Beckett and Louis Buñuel; and physically fought with fascists as the Holocaust still loomed, whilst those bombs that had eviscerated Nagasaki and Hiroshima seemed as present as if it were yesterday.  

As my story unravels, we travel through time and space into a world of HIV+ and AIDS, and where I’m finally able to make sense of that power my father had over me when he was alive. The point at which love and empathy meets truth and reconciliation is the point at which I call our participants to the stage, some of whom have never spoken up in public before, let alone under lights in their local theatre. Participants’ voices are heard and understood through the political and philosophical beliefs of Harold Pinter and his Hackney Gang. In the eyes of our audiences – who largely comprise friends, family, and allies – they have become empowered experts on their own lives, and people to look up to in their own communities.  

Mother and sons: Jeremy Goldstein and his mother Beverley Burlakov taking part in Truth to Power Café at Riverside Theatres, 2021, Sydney, Australia Photo: Ken Leanfore

In October 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic once again worsened in the UK, I flew myself to Sydney to be with my mother, Beverley. On arrival, I was in hotel quarantine for two weeks. It was here I oversaw the Singapore premiere of our digital theatre adaptation as part of the city’s new Power Play Festival. The film, which had been co-created with Montgomery College Cultural Arts Centre in USA, was one of four finalists for the 2021 Offie Award for Innovation. In Singapore it was seen by Dr Sarah Meisch Lionetto, Director of Arts and Creative Industries for British Council, who would later commission our new digital theatre project, This Is Who I Am. Set in a world beyond our own, eight differently abled artists in the UK and Singapore imagine a world designed for everyone, from the truth of their lived experience.

Also, during quarantine, I contacted Robert Love, the legendary Australian producer and former artistic director of Riverside Theatres in Western Sydney. Robert championed the project in Australia with three performances at Riverside followed by a fantastically successful tour during which we opened MELT Festival of Queer Arts and Culture at Brisbane Powerhouse, celebrated our fortieth performance event in style at Adelaide Festival Centre, and presented short digital seasons at Blacktown Arts in Sydney, and at Bunjil Place in Melbourne as part of City of Casey Ageing Positive Festival.

The Australian tour brought into focus the project’s capacity to capture social history and gave poignant political expression to lived experiences in ways I hadn’t seen before. The Riverside Theatres season opened with our first ever indigenous theatre event curated with Steven Ross. The event included Maljangapa mother and son participants Keith and Cleonie Quayle, speaking passionately from the truth of their lived experience. Cleonie spoke as a member of Australia’s stolen generation, and her son Keith’s unforgettable speech addressed Aboriginal deaths in custody, envisioning ‘a future without bars, and a world where we take ownership over societal wrong doings’. The following night, my own mother Beverley took part as a participant, recounting her life through the power of music.  

Mothers and sons: Keith and Cleonie Quayle taking part in Truth to Power Café at Riverside Theatres, 2021, Sydney Australia. Photo Ken Leanfore

In Brisbane, we heard from Brian Day OAM. Brian was one of Australia’s earliest campaigners for LGBTQ+ rights, co-founding the Brisbane branch of Camp (Campaign Against Moral Persecution) in 1971, and in 1984, at a time when HIV+ and AIDS first hit the community, he was vice-president and spokesman for the Queensland AIDS Committee. In Adelaide, Kyron Weetra, who has Narrungan ancestry, gave an impassioned takedown of colonialism, and the gaping wound at the heart of Australian national identity. Kyron was followed by Tom Webster and Anjali Beames, two young climate activists named in a class action suing the federal Environment Minister over ‘duty of care’ to block the approval of a coal mine. To thunderous applause, from a packed Adelaide Festival Centre theatre, they urgently proclaimed ‘We tell those in power, they will be held accountable’. At the newly built arts centre Bunjil Place in Melbourne, I met a community of forty everyday people eager to tell their emotive stories of displacement and migration. In the 800-seat state-of-the-art Lyric Theatre, I was able to direct my own filmic scenes for the first time. This included a spectacular rose petal drop, which I conceived to elicit authentic feelings of freedom and liberation.

However, during the making of these events, Covid had come to badly bite Australia, and we were thrown into a 100-day Sydney lockdown with less than a day’s notice. How we managed to dodge those bullets I will never know, but despite the upheavals, the Australian tour remains a highlight of the project to-date. Our Adelaide Festival Centre show and digital theatre events in Blacktown opened the British Council UK/Australia Season, and our Bunjil Place digital theatre edition – rose petal drop and all – is to my mind the definitive digital theatre edition of the show, and was critically acclaimed as part of Melbourne Fringe Arts Festival. 

By October 2021, the Sydney lockdown had ended and I was back in London. Soon after, Henry Woolf died, aged 91. In his last years, we had become great friends, and like my own father Mick, he was full of pride for their Hackney Gang and the love they shared for their great friend Harold. I know for a fact Henry was thrilled with the global success of Truth to Power Café, and so it was from the heart that we were able to dedicate our most recent performances to him as part of the launch event (in February 2022) for Rotherham Children’s Capital of Culture 2025. These events were commissioned by The Space who live-streamed the show with young participants from Rotherham. Working with them, and the dedication to Henry, filled me with optimism and hope for the future. If only our politicians could do the same!

Seven years an immigrant into this uncharted land, I am broke but happy, in the knowledge the journey has been worth it.

Such is the power of art, I have learnt that the dead may well be invisible, but they are not absent – they live on, inside of us. It’s a life lesson which enabled me to repair the damaged relationship between my father and me, and I am liberated as a result. As Dr Robert Reid said of our Bunjil Place edition in Melbourne, ‘it’s not just the memories, but the legacy they leave us with, which is alive and powerful, consciously and unconsciously giving shape to who we are, and what we think we can be’.

Despite our meagre resources, I look on in wonder at what LAP has achieved in its 20-year history. As the founder of an artist-led company, I have finally created our own unique theatrical genre of ‘truth to power theatre’ from the truth of my lived experience. For LAP to be doing what Dr Reid describes as ‘the most important work that theatre can – giving voice to those who are expected, and expect too, remain silent’  is incredibly exciting.

In the words of Mark Taylor-Batty, Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at University of Leeds, and Leader of the AHRC Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies Project:

‘What connects Truth to Power Café and This Is Who I Am is an ambition to understand and project not just what tears people apart, but what energies and self-awareness might finally bind them back together. Where Pinter’s work presented rigorous warnings of how our tendencies to betrayal and personal isolation cause rifts between friends, lovers, and communities, Truth to Power Café, and This Is Who I Am, seek to offer audiences a sense of their own agencies in repairing and recovering loss and identity. Ultimately, these two works are about love – which though never easy, is ultimately our only answer.’

Or, as Pinter himself once wrote in a letter to Henry Woolf: ‘The theatre is one of the good things of civilisation.’

Truth to Power Café, digital theatre edition for Bunjil Place, 2021, Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Graham Denholm