Jonathan Payne seeks an epic theatre. He seeks the impossible. A theatre that can fill a stadium but can also create a stadium in a 54 seat black box. A theatre that can stylistically reach all the way back to the Greeks and be set in a modern day urban landscape. And his work is urban. It is situated around black inequality and the black diaspora, but it understands race as a social construct. It seeks to underline that we are humans first, that the individual story is all our stories. That we’ve all been here before. That history is not creative, but it’s cunning. He hopes to bridge the gap between the marginalized and the affluent, “the system” and the people it governs.