Cardiff and Bradford-based theatre company Common/Wealth will premiere their bold new production, Demand The Impossible, at the Corn Exchange, Newport from 6–13 October 2025.
This part-performance, part-gig, part-sensory experience interrogates police injustice and the infiltration of activist networks by undercover officers.
The production is inspired by the ongoing ‘Spycops’ scandal, one of the most closely guarded secrets in British policing history, currently under investigation by a national public inquiry.
Between 1968 and 2010, more than 1,000 political groups were infiltrated by at least 144 undercover police officers, some of whom assumed the identities of deceased children and formed intimate relationships with activists.
Demand The Impossible was developed in collaboration with those directly affected by these covert operations, including activists and campaigners who were spied on.
The show has been created in partnership with Undercover Research Network, Police Spies Out of Lives, and the Spycops Info Podcast, and is co-produced with Wales Millennium Centre, with support from National Theatre Wales.
Featuring a live score, pumping techno, immersive visuals, and augmented reality, Demand The Impossible spans decades of civil unrest, from 1968 to the present day, exposing the uncomfortable relationships between the state, police, and citizens.
Rhiannon White, Co-Artistic Director of Common/Wealth, 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 the Spycops Info Podcast, added:
“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 said:
“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 commented:
“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.”
Listings and ticket information can be found here.
