Tottenham sees its own drama on stage

A documentary about the riots is being performed right where the trouble started. John Nathan attended

Points of view: a Q&A following a performance of The Riots (SARAH BOOKER)

If the people can't – or won't – go to the theatre, the theatres will take their shows to them. Such is the case of the Tricycle's latest verbatim play, The Riots, which is going to Tottenham, where last summer's disturbances began. Here, in stark contrast to the audiences at the Tricycle's Kilburn venue, the audience at Tottenham's Bernie Grant Arts Centre (BGAC) is the very community the play depicts.

Under artistic director Nicolas Kent, the Tricycle has a record of performing to specialist audiences. In 2010, Kent and his company travelled to Washington where they performed their Afghanistan cycle to an appreciative audience consisting entirely of US military.

"You can see a higher quality of listening," says Kent as he watches about 260 people of all ages and most races fill the auditorium. Many in the room have raw memories of 6 August, the day that sparked a fearsome crime wave. The talk among the art centre staff is of a woman who walked into the building where photographs of the riots have beenhung. One shows police silhouetted against burning buildings. The woman burst into tears and attempted to take it down, objecting to the misleading suggestion that police had attempted to protect the area from arsonists. One of the shocking facts confirmed by The Riots is that they watched it burn.

"I would have preferred to see more black people," says Kent. "But there should be more as the run continues," he predicts.

Among those taking their seats are friends and relatives of Mark Duggan, whose death by police bullet became the catalyst for violence.

After the play, there followed a Q&A session with local community activists and the play's author Gillian Slovo. It was here that it become clear that The Riots gives voice to a community that feels disenfranchised. Tottenham MP David Lammy, who was not present, came in for a lot of stick. Stafford Scott, a community activist who is represented in the play, described Lammy's book on the riots Out of the Ashes as "the most abysmal piece of opportunism", which drew lots of applause.

Another audience member said he lived just a couple of streets from the huge Allied Carpets fire – the biggest fire on the High Road. He had seen the student protests in Central London and he was shocked at the difference in policing. He said: "The most painful thing is living in the community, watching your own community being trashed, and watching officers protect the local police station while allowing the community to burn down."

Playing to specialist audiences can be highly charged, agrees actor Tim Woodward, who plays Iain Duncan Smith, and Chief Inspector Graham Dean, who was the on-call officer in Tottenham on 6 August. Woodward also played a policeman in Kent's best-known verbatim play, The Colour of Justice – sometimes simply known as the Stephen Lawrence play.

Though it opened at the Tricycle in 1999, Woodward still has vivid memories of performing in front of a mainly black audience during the transfer to the Theatre Royal Stratford East. As with all verbatim plays it was the actors' job to convey the exact words of real people.

"I was playing the assistant commissioner," says Woodward. "Unfortunately, he referred to black people as 'coloured'. Some people in the audience started barracking and at one point I had to stop acting and say, 'Look, I agree with you. But this is what he said, so I have to be truthful to that.' It was slightly intimidating. This time, I'm also playing authority figures, so I don't suppose I'll be terribly popular again."

'The Riots', Bernie Grant Arts Centre, London N15 (020 8365 5450) to 14 January