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15.04.2025
In Summer 2025, His Last Report, York Theatre Royal’s latest large-scale community production will be taking to the Main House stage. A brand-new play which has been co-written by Misha Duncan-Barry and Bridget Foreman, the show looks at one of York’s most influential social reformers, Seebohm Rowntree.
We caught up with writer Misha Duncan-Barry on the process of co-writing a play and what audiences can look forward to…
What can audiences expect from the play?
His Last Report examines the career of Seebohm Rowntree, with a particular focus on his philanthropic work and the three welfare reports he authored. While the play references all three reports, it primarily centres on the first. These reports investigated the quality of life of people living in York and analysed the root causes of poverty, shedding light on poverty across the nation.
The play focuses on the power of community and one man’s determination to improve his home by challenging the institutions that uphold poverty. Seebohm Rowntree wasn’t just concerned with financial poverty, but also with cultural deprivation — highlighting how communities suffer when culture is inaccessible. It explores poverty in a broader sense and examines the systems and structures that perpetuate it.
Poverty is a key theme, but it is fundamentally a really joyous story we are telling. The play does give you questions to go away and think about, but alongside that there is circus, dancing, time travel and a lot of humour and light.
Audiences can expect something different from what they’ve seen before – the script plays with both time and space and in that sense has a really fluid structure. It’s as bold and bright as Seebohm’s life was.
How did the idea come about for the show?
For His Last Report, the process has been slightly different from previous community productions, as we’ve involved the community right from the inception, taking a co-creation approach to developing the piece. After Sovereign ended in 2023, we sent out a survey to everyone involved to gather their thoughts on the show and to ask which York stories they’d like to see explored in future productions. We then held focus groups with the community to discuss their ideas in more depth.
We received a plethora of ideas and insights from the survey and focus groups. From there, we identified common threads and potential stories that could be told on a large scale. We narrowed these down to the top five ideas and hosted a session with members of the local community, where we pitched each concept and gathered feedback on which stories, they felt most connected to.
The Rowntree’s came up as a suggestion and the fact that we know a lot about the family but not as much about Seebohm and his work on poverty. It was a great chance to dive into their history and the life of the family and how it has impacted all of us. The work on poverty that Seebohm did felt very related to what is going on in the world today and with 2025 marking the 100-year anniversary since Joseph Rowntree’s death it felt like the perfect time to explore this topic.
What has the process of co-writing a play been like?
It’s the first time I have co-written a play and the process has been really interesting. Bridget and I split the story into strands and then began to work on different sections, splitting out the characters and protagonists and swapping and changing as we went along. Sometimes we’ve been sat in the same room working, sometimes we’ve been separate and then come together to share ideas and our writing.
It’s been a hugely fun collaboration with Bridget and a real learning curve for me as the play has come together over the last few months. Instinct has been so important and going with our gut during the editing process – we’ve had so many brilliant scenes which have ended up on the cutting room floor, but I am really excited by the script that we’ve ended on. I can’t wait to see the actors bring it to life on the stage.
What have you found most surprising about the period the play is set in and the history of Seebohm Rowntree?
It’s fascinating how much unfolded during Seebohm Rowntree’s lifetime. Each decade brought significant change — from two World Wars, the Technological Revolution, and women’s suffrage, to the early formation of the Welfare State and, of course, the growth of the Rowntree family business.
I found Seebohm’s story incredibly inspiring. He was one man who achieved so much: a chemist, head of the munitions department during wartime, and a board member of this very theatre — the list goes on. Yet despite his accomplishments, he remained humble, allowing his work to speak for itself while having a lasting impact on a national scale.
Learning more about the history of the Quakers has also been just so interesting -and how they strived for equality in all things particularly in gender. Seebohm really highlighted the women around him, and we’ve ensured that we have some strong female characters in the play.
Finally, why should people come and see the play?
The community productions are really beautiful – getting so many volunteers together to make something special is unique. Not all theatres have the capacity to do this so it’s great that York can reach out to the local community and allow them to really feel that the space is genuinely for them. It’s just really fantastic to see new writing on a main stage on such a large scale with so many people involved on and off stage.
The play is filled with both fun moments and deeply moving, heart-wrenching connections between the characters. It will make you laugh, make you cry, and — hopefully — leave you feeling inspired to go out into the world and make a difference yourself. While it’s a historical play, it’s told through modern eyes and is deeply connected to what’s happening in the present. It’s set to be an absolute extravaganza of human connection, light, love, passion, and community!
Misha Duncan-Barry is an award-winning actor, playwright and director and Resident Artist at York Theatre Royal.
His Last Report is at York Theatre Royal’s Main House stage from 22 Jul to 03 Aug.
Find out more information and book your tickets here.
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