Zack Polanski

I arrived as a music interviewer, planning to ask the prospective candidates for Mayor of Hackney about cultural policy. I was told at the last minute that Zack Polanski would be there. When his team asked whether we could talk while walking, I said yes and began an improvised line of questioning about culture, community theatre and public attention.

The conversation came from a question I felt was being missed. The Greens were regularly examined through economic and political arguments, but less was said about what they represented in British culture. Polanski's background as a community actor offered a way into that story.

I remained interested in that relationship between culture and public life, and later explored how Polanski's experience of Forum Theatre connected to Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed. That tradition turns spectators into participants and asks whether stagecraft built around public agency can translate into leadership.