'Don't underestimate what fun and play can do – put you in touch with your soul'

Does it sound melodramatic to say that drama can have an incredibly dramatic effect on a person’s life?

Cardboard Citizens is an award-winning charity that makes theatre with and for people with lived experience of homelessness. This year it celebrates its 30th anniversary (as does another organisation addressing the big issue of homelessness: this magazine).

Emilia Teglia, 45, is just one person whose life was turned around by drama and The Big Issue. In 1999, she was a vendor in London. She had come from Rome, had become addicted to class-A drugs and was now homeless.

“I was really in a