From Stage Left: Unity Theatre And Liverpool’s Living Radical Past

There are theatre buildings that simply house performances, and then there are buildings that carry an argument.

Unity Theatre, tucked away on Hope Place in Liverpool, has always belonged firmly in the latter category. Its story is not one of velvet seats, polite applause and culture as civic decoration. It is a story of workers’ movements, street-corner performance, anti-fascist resistance, socialist imagination and the stubborn belief that theatre should not merely reflect society, but challenge it.

This May and June, Unity is placing that history centre stage through A Radical Reimagining, a major National Lottery Heritage Fund project conceived by Artistic Director Eli Randle. Drawing on more than 200 boxes of archival material dating back to the 1930s, the project brings together exhibition, performance, music, workshops, archive open days and new work with young people.

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For us at MagNorth, the story is irresistible because it is profoundly Northern: a tale of culture made not above communities, but from within them.

Unity began life in the 1930s as Merseyside Left Theatre, emerging at a time of workers’ movements and political unrest. In 1944, the group joined the wider Unity Theatre movement, a national initiative committed to politically left-wing work made by and for working-class audiences. Through the 1940s, 50s and 60s, Unity staged theatre that confronted workers’ rights, fascism, capitalism and inequality - often outside conventional theatre spaces, in pubs, community halls, street corners and other places where working-class audiences already gathered.

That origin matters. It places Unity in a lineage of theatre as civic intervention: art as a form of assembly, dissent and collective thinking.

The centrepiece of the new programme is STAGE LEFT, an in-house production running from Thursday 4 to Saturday 6 June. Unity describes the show as a journey through “protest, passion and creativity”, returning to the theatre’s roots as Merseyside Left Theatre and carrying that radical storytelling into the present.

Alongside it, Young Radical Theatre Makers gives space to a new generation of artists asking urgent questions of the future, while A Radical Re-Imagining: The History of Merseyside Unity Theatre, 1937–1987 runs at Liverpool John Moores University’s Mount Pleasant Campus Library from 14 May to 28 June. Archive open days on 4 and 5 June will allow visitors to see original papers, scripts, programmes, photographs and songbooks from the Merseyside Unity Theatre collection.

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The Hope Place building itself adds another layer. Built in 1857 as Liverpool’s first synagogue for the New Hebrew Congregation, later Hope Place Synagogue, it became a theatre after the Jewish community relocated and the building was vacated. Its subsequent life as Unity continued its function as a place of gathering, argument, community and social change.

Randle’s framing of the project is especially useful for the feature. She describes the archive as a way of understanding “what Unity stood for” and why its history needs to be made visible again. She also presents the project as future-facing: not nostalgia, but inheritance - a way of asking what radical theatre might mean for younger artists now.

That gives the piece its emotional spine. This is not a sepia-toned commemoration. It is about whether the old urgencies - class, inequality, fascism, exclusion, who gets to speak and who gets to listen - have really gone away.

The wider programme sharpens that contemporary relevance. A workshop with Common/Wealth explores how to make political theatre and social change; a political songs workshop revisits protest music from the Spanish Civil War to the 1960s; and Breaking the Class Ceiling brings together Liverpool working-class artists to discuss heritage, access and the future of working-class storytelling.

For a Northern cultural publication, this is where the feature sings. Unity’s story is not only about theatre history. It is about the politics of cultural space. Who owns the stage? Who gets archived? Who is allowed to be experimental? Who gets called “radical”, and who gets dismissed as angry, provincial or difficult?

Unity’s answer, across nearly a century, appears to have been remarkably consistent: the stage belongs to people with something to say.

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In an arts climate often dominated by funding anxiety, audience development language and risk-averse programming, A Radical Reimagining feels like a useful provocation. It reminds us that radical theatre was never only about subject matter. It was about access, form, place and power. It was theatre that went to where people were. Theatre that understood entertainment and agitation not as enemies, but as partners.

Liverpool has never lacked for stages, voices or argument. Unity’s achievement is that it has held open a space where those things can meet.

And at a time when the language of inequality has returned with force - in housing, work, education, migration, climate and culture - Unity’s archive may be less a record of the past than a set of instructions.

Not all heritage looks backwards. Some of it stands under the lights, turns to the audience, and starts again.

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Editor's note:

Unity Theatre’s new heritage project A Radical Reimagining offers a rare chance to revisit Liverpool’s left-wing theatre tradition — from Merseyside Left Theatre and working-class performance to a new generation of artists asking what radical culture means now.