HI MARK, your Belfast gig next week sold out ages ago – but you've now added an extra lunchtime performance. What can people expect?
Yeah, it's really exciting – the lunchtime show is a benefit for Equal Marriage Northern Ireland and their legal challenge, which is really important.
I'll be reading from my book 100 Acts of Minor Dissent, doing a bit of Walking The Wall (2011's West Bank rambling-themed show) and all sorts.
The evening performance is part of your current Trespass tour – how's that been going for you so far?
It's great fun, actually. It's always a big game. What I do is that I go off and I do things, get into trouble, things happen and we create a story out of it.
In Salford, the council brought in a Public Space Protection Order (PSPO) to stop 'foul and abusive language' being used in the area around Media City. We've been working on theses PSPOs for a year now – in fact, it was myself and Liberty who got the story into the press, because we challenged 'em.
We said, "I'm going to be performing in that area. I often take the audience outside the theatre and do stuff. I want to know what words you count as 'foul and abusive'".
I've sent Salford Council a list of 250 words so that they can tell me which ones I can use and which ones I can't. We've started with 'arse' and gone right through alphabetically.
So far, the council have said that they will not provide a list of 'approved' words, so we're saying that if you can't define 'foul and abusive', then your law is invalid – and we will take you to court.
If you bring in a law that is about containing freedom of speech, you have to be very precise about where people break the law or don't break the law – because otherwise you get a chilling effect that people won't say things they are legally entitled to say because they might be frightened.
You've also been tackling councils who have attempted to criminalise homelessness through PSPOs. What's been the genesis of this new wave of legislation?
It comes from the coalition government's 2014 Criminal Justice Act, where councils are allowed to create these PSPOs to ban certain things.
For example, in Exeter, we did some work which we think we're going to win in the next week or two: the council wanted to introduce laws to allow officials to take away homeless people's bedding and "cardboard bedding paraphernalia"– so we organised a lynch mob after the show.
We said, "You want people to behave like that? We'll give you a lynch mob". We went round to the council offices with the audience and we brought pitchforks and flaming torches.
It was great: it quickly developed into a Twitter storm and then a media storm and now we think we're going to knock it out.
What's been the public reaction when people find out that their councils are trying to get away with this sort of thing?
People are appalled by it, as we've seen when various councils have been caught. For example, Hackney tried to ban begging and the community went nuts at them when they found out – the idea that you could give a beggar a £100 fine was just f***ing stupid.
Hackney backed down in the end, but there are places that have pushed through with it, so we are taking the fight to them, really.
There's all sorts of stuff that we're doing as kind of a rolling campaign. So the show sort of writes itself as we go along.
Trespass also tackles the increasing privatisation of formerly public spaces, can you tell me a bit about that? I believe there are hardly any truly 'free' spaces left in London, for example.
There are still public spaces but pressure is increasingly being brought to bear on them. It's getting ridiculous – my sister and myself are the only members of our family who can still afford to live in London.
I live near Battersea Park, where they used to have an adventure playground. I went there as a kid and my kids went there too. The great thing about that adventure playground was that you'd go with and play with whoever happened to be there at the time – it didn't matter what background they were from.
But recently the local council gave the land to a private developer who spruced it up a little bit and now charges £18 to get in. So now the only kids who use it are the ones whose parents can afford to pay £18.
In Hyde Park, they wanted to charge people to play sport. So we organised the world's first What's The Time Mr Wolf championship league there to see if they'd try to charge us.
We ended up taking The Department of Culture, Media and Sport to court and got it knocked out.
Have things ever started to get out of hand when you've attempted to do a protest-style action with your audience?
I've done this for so long now that I have to be really careful not to get too blasé about it. But you just have to use a certain degree of common sense – and you get to where you can detect when things are running out of control.
The one time it did happen was when this cop was just absolutely irrational. He basically threatened to baton my cameraman unless we stopped filming, which legally the police are absolutely not allowed to do.
His commanding officer actually had to put him in the back of a car and make him sit there while he came and talked to us instead.
But generally speaking, if I've organised something then there's a reason for it and people have had that reason explained to them. Like, we put a punk rock gig on on the banks of the Thames recently, because no-one seems to be too sure who's in charge down there once the water goes out.
We went down to the beach, set up a generator and had Oi-Polloi singing in Gaelic. That was great – and nobody turned up to try and stop it. They just kind of left us alone.
You can definitely get away with a lot more than you think you can.
:: Mark Thomas, Wednesday March 23, The Black Box, 12.45pm. Tickets £10/7 via Blackboxbelfast.com.
