Cardiff and Bradford-based theatre company Common/Wealth has announced the world premiere of Demand The Impossible, a bold new production exploring the ongoing ‘Spycops’ scandal.
The show will run at the Corn Exchange, Newport from 6–13 October 2025, with a press night scheduled for 8 October.
Part-performance, part-gig, and part-sensory experience, Demand The Impossible interrogates police injustice and the infiltration of more than 1,000 political groups by undercover officers between 1968 and 2010.
The production is rooted in real-life testimonies and has been developed in collaboration with those directly affected by police infiltration, including Undercover Research Network, Police Spies Out of Lives, and the Spycops Info Podcast.
Audiences can expect a visceral, immersive experience featuring a live score, pumping techno, live visuals, and augmented reality streams. The show spans decades of civil action, from the unrest of 1968 to the present day.
Rhiannon White, 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.”
Demand The Impossible is co-produced with Wales Millennium Centre and supported by National Theatre Wales, with funding from Arts Council Wales, Immersive Arts, and The John Ellerman Foundation.
Listings and ticket information can be found here.
