Maverick is a not-for-profit registered charity and is all about access, particularly for working class and under-represented communities. New audiences to plays, events, publishing, radio, podcasts, films, drama and literature. And new practitioners - actors, writers, directors, backstage and technical. It was started on a council estate in inner-city Birmingham and launched by the Lord Mayor of Birmingham in 1994. We started producing plays in informal spaces - mainly pubs. Working-class writer and founder Nick Hennegan created Maverick's original proposition. "Forget the TV for a night. Don't rent a film. Come down the pub and see a show. It's where it all started. No retakes, no cameras, no going back, just live action with real people right in front of you. Have a pint and a pie and if you don't like it you can have your money back."
Since then we've won numerous awards and performed around the world, but we are still at heart, a working class company.
- Theatre and drama are mainly accessed by the wealthiest, least diverse members of society. The Warwick Commission’s 2015 Report stated that, ‘the wealthiest, best educated and least ethnically diverse 8% of the population were still the most “culturally active”’.
- 2) Class often causes social exclusion in theatre and drama; “Within theatre – and within the arts more broadly – class continues to separate and exclude both artists and audiences.”
- 3) The Arts world is often not effective in accessing socially deprived communities: “The arts world has turned working-class people into a problem to be solved rather than audience members or artists to be developed”.
- 4) The most successful actors tend to come from wealthy, privately educated backgrounds. Famous actors such as Julie Walters and Christopher Eccleston echoed the words of the Governments Acting Up Report in 2017: ‘the arts are increasingly dominated by a narrow set of people from well-off backgrounds.’ The Sutton Trust research in 2016 revealed that, ‘42% of British BAFTA winners attended fee-paying schools when only 7% of the population is privately educated’.
We're hoping to continue bucking these trends!
