Only an American, John Kander could contend there is “a certain classlessness in theatre”.  Browse any review on these shores, catch the gesture of any audience member or the accent of an actor, and you don’t have be a scholar of Bourdieu to notice the encrusted layers of ancient class codes that accompany this most socially self-conscious of  artforms.  Class is written into the very structural fabric of British theatre, quite literally in the layout of Elizabethan theatres according to social rank, geographically in The Unity Theatre and The Group Theatre of the 1920s, metaphorically when the Angry Young Men of the 1950s banished the posh and their problems by hauling into view the kitchen sink, explicitly with the Brentons, Hares, and Griffithses of the 70s. And following the decline in class as a popular lens through which to view social life as the unequal boom years of the long Thatcherite tail, as Aleks Sierz has noted, in line with the previous Labour government’s talk of “social exclusion” it has been “the underclass” that has received the attention of playwrights in recent years. In last August’s riots this underclass took to the public stage in the riots that flared around the country, and while in those first days politicians and pundits struggled to frame the disturbances that came to so many as a surprise; it was this country’s theatre, versed and implicated in the realities of inequality, which was in a position to provide many of the clues as to the conditions and causes of social unrest.

One of the first arts writers to respond was Jonathan Jones at the Guardian, who in his column compared images of the riots to a sci-fi vision, “an imagined London, a horror scenario of the city as a blazing wilderness.” But these visions might just as well have come from British theatre. Sarah Kane’s seminal play Blasted, recently revived at Hammersmith Lyric, in which a luxury hotel room (described by Sierz as “the kind that’s so expensive it could be anywhere”) violently transmutes into a blasted concrete heath, gives echoing Beckettian space to a troubling changeable “outside”, from which we are detached and atomised. In tearing apart that cushion of glamour, Kane’s cosmic sense of instability, and her critique of consumption and deterritorialisation was conveyed as forcefully as nuclear wind. In a similar vein Mike Bartlett’s Earthquakes in London featured a middle-class middle-aged man huddling against a prevailing eschatological hurricane, adrift from the youth culture he consumes, as the globe warms, shopping and drinking his way toward oblivion. From some angles it is hard not to see us on those nights in August, scared and vulnerable, sheltering with our Twitter feeds from the incomprehensible energies outside.  What some commentators have called “aspirational rioting” and others the “triumph of consumerism”, finds echo in Leo Butler’s 2008 play Faces in the Crowd which deals explicitly with a culture where to own luxury goods is an end in itself. Dave rounds on a “life built on credit cards and debit schemes, this towering fuckin’ inventory of plastic, of borrowed goods and lowered interest rates.” These are characters in the grip of post-Fordism, without secure or well-paid jobs; people amongst the ordinary suburbanite millions who were encouraged by credit card companies to surf the property bubble through the dark undertow of consumption, tantamount to looting from their own futures.

Back in 1999 the Tricycle staged the Colour of Justice, their verbatim reconstruction of the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry which highlighted the “institutional racism” of our Police forces, while a year later Roy Williams’ brilliant Fallout featured Joe the racist policeman railing against that Post-Macpherson culture. His blithe brutality was underpinned by a kind of pragmatic honesty, that “kids round here aren’t made to feel important. They never have. They know a token gesture when they see it.” Joe’s adversaries, the posse and postcode gang, were shown to provide meaning, value, goals and solidarity in the absence of other structures; where only part of was story was the fostering of violence. In interview Williams was quite clear about how we should be relating to this invisible constituency, as he hoped “to show where these kids are coming from, and to say that this concerns everyone because these are British kids”. Lee, the policeman from William’s 2002 play Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, may have believed in a surface multiculturalism, but scratch that and we saw the bare mechanics of class and race in this country. The depth of generational mistrust in communities that have been systematically surveilled is expressed in the indelible refrain from debbie tucker green’s Random, which was adapted for Channel 4 earlier this year, in which a young girl recalls her father saying “don’t bring no po-lices back, don’t let no po-lices in”, a rhetorical flipside to the shouts of “PO-PO-PO” that menaced the August streets.