Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

A newly homeless salesman shacks up with his wife and child in a deserted railway station; in denial, they field calls from relatives on their mobile assuring them they've simply "stopped using the landline". Two coal miners in West Virginia cuss each other about what they've lost and stand to lose from the collapse of their community. A woman trapped in a Peckham tower block wins a box of bees on a TV quiz show then launches into a searing monologue about sex, urban misery and anaphalactic shock.

These are scenes from Everything Must Go, a collection of short plays and performances commissioned by the Soho Theatre. It's all a long way from credit default swaps but, as a response to the crisis, startlingly close to truthful.

. Lisa Goldman, the artistic director at the Soho Theatre, said then she expected the definitive artistic response to the crisis to take years not months. So this collection of theatre pieces, written on the fly and with just two weeks in rehearsal, was always going to be a marker along the route to that.

What the plays explore is the human response to the crisis: something I think the news media has found hard to do. When I went to the West Midlands to make a , it turned out that the real hidden misery was the short-time working situation.

Our team spent day after day with the workforce at two small factories, who were suffering the privations of half pay and short time in something close to silence. It struck me then that the human story of this recession would be much harder to tell.

Today's "Boys From the Blackstuff" would be about estate agents bragging their way through penury, factory workers silently enduring layoffs, unsentimental visits by bailiffs and repo men to shabby council flats, outbursts of undirected anger.

This is the reality captured in Everything Must Go. Goldman, directing (with Esther Richardson and Nina Steiger), individual efforts from eleven separate writers, weaves them together with a style where everything is raw, physical and emotionally intense.

There are a couple of semi-agit vaudeville songs pillorying the financial elite, but otherwise the actual banking system does not come in for much scrutiny. It is the impact on the world of the ordinary that is explored: the Visteon worker sacked with six minutes notice, so addicted to total quality management that he can't stop till he completes the component he is working on; the salesman who can't admit to his family that he's lost his home.

These are visceral performances - from Maxwell Golden in his own rap poem Everything Must Go, and Jimmy Akingbola as the quietly fuming Visteon worker. Lara Pulver (Isabella in Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ One's Robin Hood) had the hardened theatre hacks sitting near me physically flinching during her performance of Megan Barker's monologue, Anaphylactic.

It seems to me that these actors are drawing on a level of anger, frustration and confusion that is actually out there and easy to tap among the generation they come from, and which, as I say, has not been properly captured yet in journalism of any genre.

Later in the year the big guns will get going. David Hare is working on for the National Theatre in October; the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ is to unleash a series of documentaries on the anniversary of the Lehman collapse.

Everything Must Go is part of a counter-movement in British theatre that rejects the trend towards verbatim reconstruction in favour of fantasy, physicality and the occasional unashamed lunge towards melodrama. Amid the blood, guts, magic, fellatio, profanity and anaphalactic shock - it gets to the point.

, Soho Theatre, London until 4 July, 7.30pm.

My have been postponed slightly due to the situation in Iran. The plan is, as long as we are not seeing a 1990 Romania-style live feed from the IRNA studios in Tehran, to run the first report tomorrow.

Look out for it. I travel from the deep west of China to the industrial heartland of Inner Mongolia, meeting poor peasants, bikers and a very unfriendly Communist Party official who took exception to local residents in Shizuishan complaining about pollution levels that make them vomit.

In the meantime, see re. And watch my Money Programme special on short-time working in British manufacturing, tonight at 2200, on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ2, or catch the second of the China trip reports on Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World News America, if you are in the USA.

Suddenly it's possible to follow what a section of the Iranian population is thinking and doing, in almost realtime, on twitter. Blogger Simon Columbus has of people who are still communicating with the outside world via twitter. Some of the twitterers are reporting the SMS network being taken down but as I write there is one hour old news and views of the events in Tehran and beyond. For balance, there is Press TV, an English language service funded by the Iranian government. I can't get onto their website, but there's a live feed of the TV output . And reveals that, according to the Supreme Leader:

"the "miraculous hand of God" was behind the election".

Clearly no comparison with Maradona's famous was intended.

Last week I blogged on the basis of an authoritative Labour source that the Prime Minister was being lobbied to introduce Proportional Representation and an elected Lords, by senior cabinet colleagues. This was what would keep him from being "finished". The wires are now humming and lo, it has come to pass. It will be announced tomorrow for "consideration". There will have to be a referendum of course and we are now scrambling around for detail. But there you go. Now you know what it was that probably bought off the Labour rebellion.

UPDATE: It's clear the Labour proposal will be for the Alternative Vote system - this is not strictly PR. But the PR genie is out of the bottle.

Here's my take on Labour's election disaster and a balance sheet of a tumultuous crisis, which for now seems to have abated. It is based on many conversations with ministerial aides, backbench MPs and trade union officials over the past week.

1) All last week Labour and trade union people were discussing how an Alan Johnson premiership could a) do a Michael Howard and lessen the impact of the coming election defeat and b) unify the party until it limps into opposition, where the ideological debate would start in earnest.

2) Once the coup failed and a proxy war broke out between Blairites and Brownites, the rationale for "AJ" as the plotters call Alan Johnson, fell apart. The centre left - which it is worth remembering "won" the first round of the 2007 deputy leadership contest - saw no point in joining an uprising that was going to put Charles Clarke, Alan Milburn etc into a position of greater power. .

3) The AJ project always intended to allow Labour to go on doing what it is already committed to, only "better" and more sympathetically, without some of the perceived dysfunction of the Brown administration. It would also allow greater closure on the issues of Iraq and the misregulation of the banking system. The European parliament election result throws into question whether that is still possible.

4) The majority of those who voted have voted for parties that reject the Lisbon Treaty, reject Eurofederalism and want a much tougher policy on immigration. These are issues that the inner Labour factional struggle does not seem even to engage with: Labour's policy document, "" - currently being honed by Ed Miliband into an election manifesto - barely acknowledges the anger and disenchantment shown last Thursday.

5) Labour knew in advance how big the BNP threat was but had no effective strategy to counter it. I spent the Summer of 2007 touring Britain on the trail of Gordon Brown and constantly reported on the following: many in Labour's core constituency of white, English, low-paid manual workers believe the party has deserted them; that migration - above all legal migration from Eastern Europe - has undercut their wages and placed strains on their services. And they feel threatened about their identity.

Last year, when I followed David Cameron to Nuneaton, where the Conservatives won the council, I met former miners who had not voted "because the BNP weren't standing". In Thurrock I heard tales of hundreds of people in council elections writing in "BNP" where the party was not standing. Labour was, in short, fully appraised of the threat from the BNP. The party's strategists now have to explain how and why they failed to deal with it.

6) Today there is dismay in Labour circles because all the options open to them seem futile. We are hearing that Brown gave a "moving", "heartfelt" etc speech at the PLP, promising to change, listen etc. This on its own cannot have been enough to produce such a flood of support (or postponement of assassination). So we have to assume there have been concrete policy changes promised in the background.

7) Weirdly, amid it all, it is beginning to look like by default, both in makeup and possibly now in policy the government has moved slightly "left" - or a version of left. First there is the "lines to take" that ministers have been coming out with: "the Conservatives will cut public services" ("we, by inferrence, will not"). This is one big expectation to be stoking up given the state of the public finances.

Second there is the makeup of the refuseniks. What unites Purnell, Clarke, Milburn, Blears et al is that they were "small-state Blairites". Thinking back to Charles Clarke's speech in 2007 about the crossroads facing Labour: to go further down a "Fabian" - ie statist - line, or towards a social programme based on charity and social entrepreneurs... I think it's this latter position that defines the ministerial refuseniks.

That programme - "communitarian Blairism", you could call it, or Third Way 2.0 - is now hardly represented at all in Cabinet. The remaining Blairites have two general characteristics: a) they are statists b) they have a strong relationship with the Labour movement and its history. Indeed maybe we're seeing the emergence of "Mandelsonism".

8) All this, plus the election result, dictates the line of march a "reformed" Brown government will be pushed to take. If you take John McDonnell and Jon Cruddas' respective wish lists, cancelling Post Office privatisation seems a done deal; cancelling Trident will be the big one to swallow - although I know from experience that Brown's commitment to it was a sold as a tactic designed to gain Blair's agreement to stand down.

(The one and only time Damian McBride ever phoned me out of the blue was to tell me "Gordon has committed to Trident". I'd been asking him about water privatisation at the time.) We'll see.

Building a mass of new public housing? Failure to commit was the sticking point which led Cruddas to turn down a ministerial position last year. Then there is subsidy for short time working: this seems to be popping up in the wish list of a lot of Brown's new found left supporters so watch out for it. Since there is half a billion allocated to support for industry, and 220,000 people on short time working, the current budget would seem to cover a one-off payment of roughly Β£2 each - excuse the bad maths: it's Β£2,000, as commenter inoncom points out below.

9) The PLP left and centre left have put Brown "on probation until the Autumn". Meanwhile the "radical centre" has detached itself from cabinet and is in a far more volatile mood. The PLP meeting seals the end of the period where it was possible that the "disparate" rebels - Barry Sheerman et al - could mount any kind of effective coup.

I understand the last remnant of a Johnson "machine" was definitively stood down this afternoon. So there will now be a phoney war within the Labour party until the conference. Highly unclear whether that will do anything to reconnect them to the masses of voters who stayed away, let alone endear them to last night's electoral majority who want out of Lisbon. Since the "centre right" in Britain is now so clearly defined around these issues, the whole point of the Blairite project - reaching out across the traditional divide - gets a lot harder.

10) That's my provisional analysis. It could all change quickly. The next major gambit or decision Gordon Brown makes will be seen as a test of the commitments he made tonight. But first we have to find out what they are.

There is hyper-febrility among political journalists at the moment, and lots of speculation about a Labour leadership contest. What follows is not speculation but a reliably sourced fact...

Gordon Brown's cabinet colleagues have told him that "unless he is radical he is finished". What do they mean by radical? I have been told that he is being urged to launch a constitutional reform initiative consisting of two primary proposals:
1) An elected house of Lords
2) Proportional representation

I don't know whether he is minded to take that advice, nor what form of PR is being proposed. I do know those urging him to do this are senior cabinet members. Over and out.