A ONE man play about the workplace will be performed in Shipton Gorge on December 2.

Artsreach is delighted to welcome Townsend Theatre Productions back to Dorset this autumn with a brand new staging of Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

For the first time ever this new version of the play will be presented as a solo show, featuring writer and actor Neil Gore, and will comprise an Edwardian Magic Lantern Show, political conjuring tricks and live music and song as the audience joins the performer through the events surrounding the renovation of a large townhouse, meeting the many familiar and infamous characters from the book.

In 2011-12 the company toured an acclaimed two-man version of the show to full halls right across Dorset. Due the warm reception the play received across the country, Gore and director Louise Townsend have revised the production, transforming it into a one-man show complete with speeches and songs from the classic book, featuring the Great Money Trick as its centrepiece.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a unique document. A novel of humour and sharply observed characterisation, it is also a passionate defence of socialist ideas and one of the first truly imaginative portrayals of life written from a working-class perspective. The book charts a year in the lives of a group of painters and decorators in the town of Mugsborough at the turn of the last century. Haunted by fears of unemployment, the men struggle to keep their jobs at any cost but, in the course of events, some of them begin to realise that their condition of miserable poverty is neither ‘natural’ or ‘just’. These workers, the ‘philanthropists’ of the title, who throw themselves into back-breaking work for poor wages to generate profit for their ‘masters’ are joined by an artist, Owen, whose spirited attacks on the dishonesty of capitalism, along with his socialist vision, highlight their workplace exploitation and the inequality in society as a whole.

Writer and adapter of the book, Neil Gore said: "What’s so special about the book, and what to expect from the play, is how it relates so closely to everyone’s experience of work: the workplace hierarchy; petty and amusing incidents of workplace rivalry; workers’ good-natured humour and banter; hostility to political change and the acceptance of greed as inevitable and a natural way of life.”

*See The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in Broadmayne (07443 659912) on Friday, November 30 at 7.30pm, Gillingham Library (01747 822180) on Saturday December 1 at 7.30pm and Shipton Gorge (01308 897407) on Sunday December 2 at 7.30pm. Tickets and further information are also available at artsreach.co.uk.