Our Open Pitch programme enabled Lisa McKenzie to collaborate with Jayne Williams in a brand new process, as they drew together familiar mining stories, through the lens of the unfamiliar voices of teenage girls and women. Lisa grew up in Sutton in Ashfield where Participation Director Jayne Williams also grew up. Both their mining families went out (and stayed out) in the 1984/85 Miners Strike and although 10 years separates them, they share similar stories of class, community and coming of age. 

As a result,  Lisa and Jayne have co-written a powerful new play that explores how childhood dreams turn into adult realities, overnight. sixTeen is a working class, coming of age story that follows a girl navigating a well worn path, searching for a new avenue and ending up in a cul de sac. A familiar story of the miners strike but told by the unfamiliar voices of girls and women. The story is is set in 1984-5, embedded in Sutton in Ashfield on the Carsic Estate.  It’s not about nostalgia, instead salient to the issues of today. Set in Thatcher’s Britain but which speaks to a post industrial Starmer society.

We invited guests to a script-in-hand sharing at New Perspectives in April and were thrilled that in September over 400 people saw the piece across a series of script in hand readings and participated in post show Q&A sessions Discover more.

JOIN US IN BRINGINg SIXTEEN TO MORE AUDIENCES

We are thrilled that more than 400 people experienced sixTeen and took part in our post-show Q&A sessions in September 2025. The response has been extraordinary and your enthusiasm has confirmed how urgently this piece resonates.

Now, we need your support

To meet the growing interest and ensure sixTeen reaches even more communities, we are currently fundraising to schedule additional performances throughout 2026-27. Every contribution, both big or small will directly help us deepen the impact of this work and keep vital conversations alive.

Be part of the journey and help shape the next chapter bringing sixTeen to more communities. Donate now

sixTeen in rehearsal 2025

Dr Lisa Mckenzie is a working-class academic currently working with the University of Bedfordshire as Senior Lecturer in Sociology. As a researcher and educator her work focusses on class inequality using a collaborative ethnographic approach. She's the co-founder of the Working Class Collective which created groundbreaking projects during the Pandemic and continue to tell working class stories in creative ways. Lisa is an anarchist author of several books including bestselling Getting By: Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain. 

Banner image: (L-R) Jayne Williams with Lisa McKenzie. © Kate Walker Photography