‘We wanted to tell the wider story': play highlights impact of ‘spycops' scandal

The Guardian

05-06-2025

There's one moment from the public inquiry into undercover police officers – known as 'spycops' – that sticks in the theatre director Rhiannon White's mind. It was during the questioning of Bob Lambert, an officer who deceived at least four women into sexual relationships in the 1980s, and fathered a child with one of them.
'Lambert's lack of attention to detail was shocking; the whole thing seemed like a process to him. Whereas Belinda Harvey, one of the women, meticulously remembered every single detail of their relationship, every feeling, every thought. She said she was in her early 20s when she met him, and she was basically groomed into activism by him. This is someone whose life was completely turned inside out and upside down by the state. This is someone who was raped by the state.'
White, the artistic director of Cardiff and Bradford-based theatre company Common/Wealth, is directing a new play based on the scandal and inquiry.
Entitled Demand the Impossible, the play – written by Taylor Edmonds and initially commissioned by National Theatre Wales – interrogates police injustice and the infiltration of more than 1,000 political groups between 1968 and 2010.
The play has been developed in close collaboration with campaign groups including Undercover Research Network and Police Spies Out of Lives, drawing on the victims' enormous sense of betrayal and their ongoing fight for justice.
'My own friends who were part of the Cardiff Anarchist Network [CAN] were spied on by the police,' White said. 'My friend Tom Fowler found out his best friend of four years was an undercover copper called Mark 'Marco' Jacobs.'
According to CAN, Jacobs took minutes at meetings and made newsletters and banners, but in reality he was gathering intelligence, disrupting the group's activities, and using it to infiltrate other groups, including a European network of activists.
'Tom was frustrated because a lot of people were taking on the spycops story and sensationalising it without talking to the activists involved. So we decided to put on our own play,' White said.
'We wanted to tell the wider story of how activism has been affected. The impact on society has been massive. Some of the changes that historically activists have campaigned for, and which are now enshrined in law, like the right of women to have bank accounts, or animal rights, were slowed down because of the effects of infiltration. The spycops turned people against each other, pulled them apart.
'We also wanted to ask: how do we go beyond that state interruption, to really demand a better world and be defiant with it?'
The spycops scandal, one of the most closely guarded secrets in British policing, has been the subject of extensive reporting, spearheaded by the Guardian since 2010.
At least 144 undercover officers in deployments typically lasting four years were sent to infiltrate mainly leftwing and progressive groups, and at least four of the undercover officers are known or alleged to have fathered children with women they met during their deployments.
Fowler, who hosts the Spycops Info podcast, said it was challenging to express 'how fundamental the impact of the infiltration of progressive social movements has been, not just on the individuals who were targeted but also on society at large.
'We are in Britain all haunted by successive governments' decisions to suppress dissidents on the left and allow the far right to flourish – so much so that through the vetting and the blacklisting, nobody with any serious leftwing credentials gets into any positions of influence within society, whilst those on the right are all around us.
'I really hope the play serves as a glimpse into just how dystopian this country has become,' he added.
Demand the Impossible premieres at the Corn Exchange, Newport, from 6 to 13 October 2025.