Applied Theatre and the Advocacy Gap in Financial Remedies

The distance between what the law recognises and what the court can be persuaded to understand is worth pausing to consider. This article examines how applied theatre, already being employed in parts of the criminal justice system, might assist in bridging that distance, where so many cases falter. Section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 requires the court to consider ‘all the circumstances of the case’. Yet research by Surviving Economic Abuse shows that 95% of domestic abuse victims experience economic abuse, and that 60% are left in debt as a direct result. These figures underline the scale of the problem: recognition exists in law; yet its translation into persuasive evidence that meets the threshold can remain elusive.

Evidence from adjacent justice settings illustrates the potential of applied theatre to shift outcomes. First developed in 2017 by Open Clasp Theatre with women with learning disabilities and autism, Us Too: Alisha’s Story was in 2023 piloted by Durham Constabulary as a training film in reflective workshops with over 70 officers and practitioners. The sessions prompted immediate changes to safeguarding protocols and a commitment to embed survivor perspectives in policing practice. One officer described it as ‘the most impactful training of a fourteen-year career’. Broader data corroborate this impression: forces that received structured coercive control training recorded a 41% increase in arrests compared with untrained forces.

A parallel can be drawn for family law. The financial consequences of economic abuse, coerced debt, lost earnings, diminished capacity to work, and the additional costs of caring for children with special educational needs, resist neat presentation within the evidential framework. The challenge is less one of recognition, for statute and case law already acknowledge coercive control, than one of persuasion. Persuasion in this context requires advocates to structure fragmented experiences of economic abuse into a cumulative and comprehensible pattern, capable of meeting the evidential threshold. Without such narrative coherence, the risk is that formally recognised harms remain practically unremedied. Nor is the point confined to s 25: similar evidential difficulties arise in Schedule 1 proceedings under the Children Act 1989, where the costs of childcare, education, or special needs provision are difficult to frame persuasively within conventional submissions.

When I was first introduced to applied theatre methodologies a decade ago, while training as a director at the Almeida Theatre, I was apprehensive. Could techniques drawn from theatre practice really have relevance to advocacy and the law? Experience has shown that they do. Applied theatre is not rehearsal in the traditional sense, but a disciplined mode of inquiry designed to expose hidden dynamics and test narratives before they are presented in the public forum. In advocacy, as in black-letter law, its value lies in structuring fragmented experience into a coherent pattern capable of persuasion.

The intellectual lineage is instructive. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher, argued that understanding is not deposited by authority into passive recipients but co-created through dialogue. Augusto Boal, his contemporary, extended these principles into theatre, conceiving performance as a method for exposing hidden structures and testing alternative outcomes. My teacher and mentor, Anna Scher MBE, British theatre director and community practitioner, founder of the Anna Scher Theatre and recipient of the Pearson Award for Special Achievement in Theatre, made role reversal the discipline of her practice, requiring participants to inhabit perspectives other than their own as a means of inclusivity.

For advocates, the relevance is immediate. Persuasion is not achieved solely by assertion, but by structuring a narrative that the court can engage with and understand. To persuade, an advocate must make patterns visible, test coherence, and anticipate the opposing party’s perspective. Role reversal in particular mirrors what every family law barrister must practise daily: the ability to embody the argument on the other side in order to refine and fortify one’s own. This structured narrative, a key element of persuasion, is where applied theatre can make a significant difference.

Scher’s influence reached far beyond her Islington theatre. She was invited to Northern Ireland during the Troubles, to Rwanda in the aftermath of genocide, to Bosnia, and to the Israeli village of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, where her pedagogy of accessibility, improvisation and role reversal was deployed as a method of conflict resolution in some of the most divided contexts. As her former student, I came to understand that role reversal was not merely a device but a discipline of perspective-taking, one equally vital in the courtroom.

Judith Ackroyd, Professor Emeritus at Manchester Metropolitan University, has observed that applied theatre operates along axes of participation and intentional transformation: used superficially, it risks becoming entertainment; used deliberately, it reshapes understanding. The same is true of advocacy, which demands method and discipline if persuasion is to be achieved. Aristotle observed that persuasion is an art; Murrow reminded us that its foundation is credibility; and Sun Tzu taught that success depends on understanding one’s adversary. Applied theatre translates each of these insights into practical advocacy.

The statutory framework itself is clear. Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 criminalises controlling or coercive behaviour, while the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 expressly includes economic abuse within its definition of domestic abuse. Section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 requires the court to consider all the circumstances of the case. The law, therefore, already provides the architecture to take account of economic abuse.

The difficulty lies in evidential persuasion. In Traharne v Limb [2022] EWFC 27, Sir Jonathan Cohen accepted that coercive and controlling behaviour could amount to ‘undue pressure’ under Edgar v Edgar [1981] 2 FLR 19. Yet the wife’s claim failed for want of proof that her freedom of choice had been truly overborne. In F v M [2021] EWFC 4, Hayden J observed that coercion seldom reveals itself in single incidents but only in its cumulative pattern. In G v G [2024] NIMaster 5, Master Bell recognised that coercive control can erode self-esteem, isolate the victim, and curtail earning capacity, factors of direct relevance to financial remedy assessment. The jurisprudence signals openness to such arguments but also demonstrates the necessity of a patterned and substantiated narrative.

Charitable and practitioner research points in the same direction. In its 2023 report Seen Yet Sidelined, Surviving Economic Abuse found that although economic abuse was referenced in almost two-thirds of prosecutions for controlling or coercive behaviour, it was often marginalised in charge decisions. Resolution’s 2024 survey recorded that nearly 80% of family practitioners believe the courts do not yet adequately account for domestic abuse in financial remedies.

Building on this, further data underline the scale of the problem. Surviving Economic Abuse and Ipsos UK estimate that 15% of women in the UK, around 4.1 million, experienced economic abuse in the past year, with 23% reporting that the abuse prevented them from leaving the relationship. Victim-survivors are often left with coerced debts averaging more than £20,000, and Refuge estimates that economic abuse contributes to £14.4 billion of debt across the UK. The scale is undeniable; the challenge is to ensure these realities are translated into persuasive evidence the court can meaningfully evaluate.

Case studies from related justice settings vividly illustrate how applied theatre can enhance recognition and transform outcomes. These examples serve as a testament to the transformative potential of this innovative approach.

In the United States, the Participatory Defense model, developed by Silicon Valley De-Bug, integrates families into defence preparation through timelines, mitigation materials and narrative framing. In its first three years, it reported preventing more than 1600 years of incarceration in California. The principle is clear: narrative coherence, co-produced with those most affected, can alter legal outcomes.

Clean Break theatre company offers a parallel example of transformation within the justice system. For over 40 years, it has used performance to make visible the circumstances of women in prison, many of whom are themselves survivors of abuse. Dame Harriet Walter, its patron of three decades, has remarked: ‘Actors have a special advantage in that we imagine ourselves to be in other people’s lives and other people’s skins… There but for the grace of God go I.’

Dame Walter’s words capture the discipline of perspective-taking that underpins both applied theatre and effective advocacy. Just as actors must climb into another’s skin, so too must barristers in family proceedings learn to inhabit their client’s circumstances, and those of the opposing party, in order to present a nuanced and persuasive account.

Dr Sarah Bartley’s Arts Toolkit for Transformative Justice (Nuffield Foundation, 2022) underscores the point. Her research emphasises trauma-informed, co-creative practice, inclusive design for neurodivergent participants, and artistic expression beyond legal language. The lesson is that empathy is not generated by proxy but through direct encounter. For advocates, this reinforces the notion that persuasion depends on structuring lived experience into patterns that the court can comprehend.

Economic abuse rarely appears as a single act but as a cumulative pattern of coerced debt, curtailed opportunities for work, isolation from networks, and additional caring responsibilities. These pressures are intensified in Schedule 1 cases, where primary carers of children with special educational needs may be permitted to remain in property only until the child reaches majority, after which the home must be returned to the other parent, despite caring duties often continuing well beyond the age of 21. They are further compounded by the failings of the Child Maintenance Service, where perpetrators may use non-payment or under-payment of maintenance as a means of continuing financial control, a problem highlighted by Gingerbread, Surviving Economic Abuse, and the House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee, which in 2022 described the CMS as ‘not fit for purpose’ in protecting children and survivor-parents.

Recent case law shows that while the principle is acknowledged, proof often fails for want of narrative coherence. Applied theatre offers practical methods that address this challenge: Freire’s dialogical approach suggests conferences that elicit patterns rather than isolated incidents; Boal’s interventions refine narrative coherence and anticipate resistance; and Scher’s discipline of role reversal equips barristers to inhabit the opposing perspective and fortify submissions. These are not theatrical devices but advocacy disciplines, ways of structuring black-letter law into persuasive narrative.

As Lynda Gibbs KC (Hon), Dean of The Inns of Court College of Advocacy, has noted:

‘For the past 10 years the ICCA has been involved in developing and improving training for advocates in a pan-profession approach to improve the ability of vulnerable people and children to participate fully and effectively in the criminal and family jurisdictions. This training has vastly improved the way in which questions are constructed and asked, so that cross-examinations are shorter, more focussed, and they avoid exploiting a vulnerable person or child's ability to fully understand what is being asked of them and how they want to answer. An abridged version of this training is made available to all ICCA Bar students as a crucial introduction to an advocacy skill they will need to develop further in practice.’

This emphasis on method is especially important given that many early-career practitioners will have little experience of, for example, the pragmatic costs and lived impact of caring duties shaped by economic abuse. Applied theatre pedagogy may offer a complementary way to cultivate the empathy, pattern recognition and narrative coherence that such advocacy requires.

The difficulty is not the absence of legal recognition, for statute and case law already accommodate coercive control, but the task of structuring complex realities into a persuasive and patterned narrative. Applied theatre offers a complementary discipline for cultivating the faculties advocacy requires: empathy, coherence, perspective-taking, and the recognition of pattern.

To integrate these methods is not to theatricalise the courtroom but to render complex lived experience legible within the evidential framework. As Lady Hale observed in Radmacher v Granatino [2010] UKSC 42, ‘family law is the means by which the state sets the framework for people’s family lives’. Applied theatre offers a means of shaping that framework more justly: by embedding lived experience within legal narrative and enabling courts not only to see the law but also to feel its human weight.

Procedurally, such methods could be piloted in discrete areas of practice. In Schedule 1 hearings, structured workshops could assist advocates in presenting the cumulative impact of economic abuse and long-term caring responsibilities, while witness preparation sessions could use role reversal techniques to strengthen vulnerable parties’ ability to communicate their experience coherently and confidently. Through the Inns of Court, these methods could be introduced as qualifying sessions or as optional elements within the New Practitioners’ Programme, embedding them into the culture of advocacy training at an early stage.

A multi-force study by Barlow et al. (2020)^[1] likewise found that police forces trained in recognising coercive control reported a 41% increase in arrests compared with untrained forces. The lesson is clear: method matters. Where structured techniques are adopted, outcomes shift. In family law, the same is true: persuasion requires method, and applied theatre may provide a complementary tool for advocates seeking to translate lived experience into persuasive legal narrative.