THE LIBERTY TREE is a deliberate attempt to use theatre as a tool to bring about progressive political change.

It’s agitprop meets the Wizard of Oz and it aims to be an uplifting satire on modern Britain. Performed by students and young activists, we want it to be an inspiring night out for all lefties, radicals, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists and fellow travellers.

It tells the story of Rosa, a young woman working in one of the electronic sweatshops of the 21st century — a call centre — where she witnesses a manager cruelly bullying a colleague but does nothing.

A fellow worker intervenes and is sacked and Rosa, tormented by her cowardice in the face of such injustice, falls asleep and dreams. When she awakes, she’s trapped in the The Land Of Do What You’re Told where she soon discovers that the only way out of this country of obedience and subservience is to go on a journey to find “the liberty tree.”

Recognising that the main aim of all theatre is to entertain the audience, the show sets out to be a romping, hilarious, feel-good antidote to the austerity agenda and a great night out for anyone sick to death of being overworked, underpaid, undervalued and stressed out.

It’s a response to what I perceive as a crisis of political education in Britain. The history and character of our social democracy and of the progressive economic and political struggles that have brought it about are simply not taught in our schools or colleges and many young people have not even the flimsiest notions of how we got to be supposedly free citizens in a free country, let alone that it is possible to resist the exploitation they are all too aware they are experiencing in the workplace.

The Liberty Tree is deliberately aimed at these young people, students and young trade unionists and is an attempt to address this failure of education — not through lectures and textbooks but through the vehicle of a large-scale musical which uses drama, music and comedy to demonstrate the political realities of how power is expressed and to extol the virtues of collective political action as a response of the powerless to the abuses of the powerful.

The style of the music we’re using is inspired by the tradition of rebel folk songs from the 18th and 19th centuries but informed too by the work of artists such as Woody Guthrie, Billy Bragg, Dick Gaughan and The Pogues and, most recently, contemporary folk, pop and rock by bands such as Noah and the Whale, Bellowhead and Mumford and Sons.

The history of political struggle also informs other aspects of the piece. The show band’s name Captain Swing and the Celtic Soul Rebels is a direct reference to the Luddite and Swing riots of the 1830s that used the name Captain Swing to sign threatening letters sent to landowners. The Levellers, The Jacobins, The Chartists and the Suffragettes also played their part in the development of the play and this production.

We’re using projection, music and dance as well as narrative, character and dialogue, to create the impressionistic, mythical and historicised Land Of Do What You Are Told, in an attempt to make explicit the similarities between the political struggles of today and those of the past 200 years.

The narrative structure’s taken from The Wizard Of Oz, which itself references the traditional narrative form of the “heroic journey” as exemplified by Homer’s Iliad.

But this reference to the Judy Garland musical is a statement of our primary commitment to put on a show that entertains the audience.

So while I hope people get a lot out of the production in terms of ideas and information, above all I hope they have a bloody good time. Fingers crossed!

Runs at the Cockpit Theatre, Gateforth Street, London NW8, from June 24-27, box office: thecockpit.org.uk