Interview - Rod Dixon: Theatre that still dares to be radical

In 1968, a group of actors stood atop a red ladder and one of the country's most significant agit-prop theatre companies was born.

"The thing about Red Ladder is that lots of very significant people have come through the company at some point," says artistic director Rod Dixon. "Our work has constantly tried to ask questions about the world."

Red Ladder began life as The Agitprop Street Players when a group of socialists banded together to perform a play at the Trafalgar Square Festival of 1968. By 1971 they had adopted the name Red Ladder (after the prop on which they first performed) and in 1976 the company moved to Yorkshire, where it has since been based.

Before he joined the company as artistic director in 2006, Rod Dixon thought it had disappeared from Britain's cultural map.

"The company had gone underground, I thought it had folded," says Dixon. "The first I heard was in 2006 when Silent Cry came to Plymouth where I was artistic director. As a theatre maker and as an activist with radical politics I was really excited that Red Ladder was still around. So many of those old agit-prop theatre companies had disappeared."

The company has always served to antagonise the status quo. Dixon is carrying on the fine tradition.

Over an hour-long interview the charismatic and engaging director talks about demonstrations he was involved in against power stations, why we need to be shaken out of our slumber and get angry at the banks and why our planet could be done for within eight years.

It is the last of these – global warming – that Dixon gets particularly passionate about; the company's latest production, Ugly, deals with the issue. In the Red Ladder offices, in the basement of the Yorkshire Dance building in Leeds's Cultural Quarter, a newspaper sits on a coffee table, the front page a picture of the floods in Pakistan.

"That's us in 20 years time," says Dixon. "If our atmosphere keeps warming in the way it is, we're talking about Hurricane Katrina, happening on a monthly basis. That might sound alarmist, but that's how dangerous it is."

Red Ladder may have lost the words agit prop from its title – it has not lost them from its spirit. Dixon is careful to remember that, as much as he wants to create theatre with a message, he wants the audience to come along. "We can't sell a piece of theatre about global warming. We have to tell people it's a dark comedy. Above all it is a very funny, very dark comedy."

And the chances are it will be. Emma Adams, an Armley-based writer, is one of the region's up and coming talents and has already had significant success, with her play Forgotten Things, which tackled the issue of teenage suicide with wit and black humour. Don't, however, expect an easy ride.

"I think there are moments where people might walk out. There's a piece of off-stage violence that worries me, but I think if we keep the audience past that, then they'll stay with us," says Dixon. Does he really want to stage a play where he thinks there is a risk of losing audience members?

"Absolutely. Theatre shouldn't be a comfortable experience. We want to slap people around a bit. The reason theatre can affect such change is because it's live, it's happening there and then. I don't want people to sit there saying, 'Ooh, nice costumes' and 'Nice lights'."

Ugly, Leeds Carriageworks, September 27 and 28. Tickets

0113 224 3801, then touring. Details on www.redladder.co.uk