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"I do like Liverpool as a city but I do feel like it's racist in areas – and let's not sugar coat it, it's racist. If there wasn't no racism, maybe people, like, more black people, more Asian people, would feel free to live in certain areas that they're not allowed to. Like where all the nice houses are, that's where the racist people are.."
The words ring out across a small performance space where a dozen young people are gathered.
They are part of 20 Stories High, a theatre company based in the city, and their latest production, Tales from the MP3, involves the cast playing each other as they reenact their real-life conversations and debates on topics such as immigration, race and religion.
With the cast members ranging from those born in the UK, Cameroon, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, fighting back against the often homogenous world of mainstream arts is an essential part of their productions.
But it is striking how this performative engagement with politics feels so uncommon. In the 1970s when similar issues of austerity politics, youth disenfranchisement and insecurity permeated society, culture and the arts responded with rebellious force.
The punk movement emerged from the anger, and almost every aspect of society, from consumerism to race relations, rising unemployment and police brutality, came under fire. The Sex Pistols railed against the "fascist regime" and the Clash cried: "Murder is a crime, unless it's done by a policeman or an aristocrat."
So, where, people have asked, is this generation's cry of anger?
Anita Welsh, 20 Stories High's assistant producer, said that it was vital that popular culture did more to engage with the feelings and anger of her own generation.
"We address those issues that affect us in real life and put it on in front of an audience," said Welsh. "The whole point of what we do in our plays is to ask 'why is no-one talking about racism or immigration?, 'why is no-one addressing the stuff that is really going?'. Young people don't feel they can relate to theatre because it's not about them and not about their life. The lack of education in terms of politics and what is going on in real life is a very big issue."
On the top floor of an abandoned office block in Hackney, rehearsals have begun for Beyond Caring. The play, by Alexander Zeldin, grapples with the issue of zero-hours contracts and accuses the government of allowing an "invisible and dehumanised" class of temporary workers to form who are in a constant state of insecurity as they move from job to job.
As part of his research for the play, which will debut at Hackney's Yard Theatre in July, Zeldin worked as a cleaner and temp worker and recently had an interview for a cleaner job at Heathrow airport.
Zeldin said: "It's very dehumanising that people are being made to work and live in complete impermanence. They don't know what's waiting for them, they are made to feel they need to sell themselves as if they are sales executives – you have cleaners doing personality tests.
"This government is doing everything in its power to crush the weakest people in society and it strikes me as irresponsible to do a play that's set in the 17th century when there's so much going on now, you can't not engage with it.
"I would say there is a shift happening where risk taking is becoming part of our theatre culture. How can there not be? I mean, have you seen our government?"
James Graham, whose recent production, Privacy, at London's Donmar Warehouse, tackled surveillance, took a similar view. His new production, The Angry Brigade, which will be staged in September, looks at the vigilante group that emerged in 1970s Britain in response to an era of recession, depression, social fragmentation and cuts.
"Of course, I am very much drawing on the times we live in for the play," he said. "You can certainly see over the past three years an anger developing and the desire to express that somehow. Alongside other young playwrights, it feels like we all share a desire to reach a mainstream popular audience with these plays that deal with big political ideas, and not something that is accessed by only the politically elite few."
Both Zeldin and Graham's plays are highly reactive plays that are breaking into the mainstream, and playwright Tim Price said they illustrated that, far from culture disengaging from current social issues, there was a "golden age" of political theatre emerging.
Price, himself a highly political Welsh playwright, has penned works such as The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning and Protest Song, a one-man show about the Occupy movement.
He said: "It's true, there doesn't seem to be those great political music anthems of our time and the cultural response these days is certainly less cohesive. "However I think my peer group are one of the most politically engaged wave of playwrights that we've had and I think they are tacking these issues in new and interesting ways."
Price also wrote for one of the most political and reactionary theatre groups, Theatre Uncut, which was formed three years ago in the wake of the Conservative austerity measures, to galvanise a powerful cultural response. Indeed, in the wake of severe cuts to arts funding, he was adamant that life was being injected back into the theatre by an emerging trend towards grassroots arts organisations.
Price added: "People are forming their own companies, finding their own spaces rather than trying to navigate the hierarchical power and go into a major theatres. There is a connection between suspicion towards the corporatocracy which is played out through suspicion of the way the major theatres are funded and they way they make their decisions. I think there is a DIY culture in the arts which is reflecting the DIY political culture, like Occupy and Anonymous."
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