Common/Wealth Unveils Demand The Impossible
Cardiff and Bradford-based theatre company, Common/Wealth has today announced Demand The Impossible, a vital new production interrogating police injustice and infiltration of activist networks. The production will receive its world premiere at the Corn Exchange, Newport from 6-13 October 2025, with a press night on 8 October 2025. Tickets will go on sale at a later date.=
One of the most closely guarded secrets in British policing history, the current public inquiry is investigating undercover police officers who spied on more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and at least 2010, sometimes stealing dead children’s identities.
At least 144 undercover officers in deployments typically lasting four years were sent to infiltrate mainly leftwing and progressive groups. At least four of the undercover officers are known or alleged to have fathered children with women they met during their deployments. Demand The Impossible untangles the ‘Spycops’ scandal and its impact on real lives.
The development of the production has involved close collaboration with Undercover Research Network, Police Spies Out of Lives, and the Spycops Info Podcast, in a co-production with the Wales Millennium Centre, supported by National Theatre Wales.
Part-performance, part-gig, part-sensory experience, Demand the Impossible challenges audiences to question truth, trust, and power as uncomfortable relationships between the state, police and citizens are exposed. Featuring a reverberating live score, pumping techno, live visuals, and augmented reality streams, Demand The Impossible will create an immersive world reaching back to the summer of unrest in 1968, across decades of civil action into the 21st century and beyond, shining a light on ‘the futures they stole from us.’
Artistic Director of Common/Wealth, Rhiannon White said: “For years, friends of ours had their lives infiltrated and spied on by the police. They were people who believed in a better world, who wanted more for everyone, and justice for those who had been wronged.
“This was a significant breach of trust by the state; their agents systematically targeted people, befriending them, having intimate relationships, and insidiously planting roots in their lives. Their target’s crimes – demanding better.
“Common/Wealth have been working with people whose lives have been impacted by police infiltration and injustice. Activists, workers, families and working-class people whose worlds have been turned upside down and inside out by the state.
“This show is raging. A call to arms, to not look away, to get swept up in a raucous punk gig, hear stories shaped by real-life testimonies and experience the world of immersive surveillance.
“The show asks tough questions – what happens to those prepared to speak up? How much power do we really have in shaping our future? As the Cardiff Anarchist Network said, they come at us because we are strong, not because we are weak. It’s time to demand the impossible.”
Tom Fowler, Host of Spycops Info Podcast, said: “The deployment of secret undercover political police has had an immeasurable impact on those who were infiltrated but it has also had significant consequences for society in general.
“It is challenging to express the enormity of the implications of undermining, destabilising and subverting every progressive social movement over 50 years. It has left us with extremism at the centre of UK politics, haunted by the ghosts of a stolen future for a better world.”
Chris Brian of Undercover Research Group added, “I am really buzzed to be involved with this project – and know that Common/Wealth will do justice to this great injustice and bring it to a new audience in an insightful, innovative and thrilling way.”
Lindsey from Police Spies Out of Lives said, “Successive UK governments have spent decades using ‘spycops’ to trash the human rights of a large section of the public. These secret state operations, using women as disposable perks of the job, reveal a breathtaking misogyny. I can’t wait to see how Common/Wealth interprets this scandal, most importantly our fightback-of which this production is a part.”
Demand The Impossible is presented in partnership with Police Spies out of Lives, Undercover Research Network and Spycops info podcast in a co-production with Wales Millennium Centre. Funded by Arts Council Wales, Immersive Arts and The John Ellerman Foundation. Supported by National Theatre Wales.
Main Image: Courtesy of Common/Wealth
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