LEEDS company The Paper Birds go for Broke at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, from Wednesday to Friday.

A verbatim piece about personal and national debt, Broke premiered at last summer’s Edinburgh Fringe with its hard-hitting account of true stories from the front line of poverty and debt in Britain, including harsh looks at the performers’ own finances.

The stark truth is that 13 million people are living in poverty in Britain, more than half of them from working families, and at Christmas 2013, the Red Cross started asking for food donations for the first time since the Second World War.

So, what happens when you have to resort to sex work to pay the bills, or try to give up dealing drugs only to end up at a food bank when the money dries up, too? What happens when you have to sell everything you own to buy enough petrol for a journey across the country to visit your parents, or when at 28 you can’t buy anything more than cheap white bread to eat in the supermarket?

Devised and performed by The Paper Birds from a female perspective, the show considers what it means to be broke in 2015 as a person and as a country.

The revelations come from interviews done in food banks, hostels, charity shops and betting shops, mostly in and around West Yorkshire in 2014. The play opens up the alarming statistics behind being penniless in an age of personal and state debt.

Broke comes from the Leeds team behind 2011’s Thirsty, which used verbatim testimonies from the nation’s young drinkers to investigate the binge-drinking culture.

This time, The Paper Birds present a heartfelt and urgent look at the debt of a nation, from displaced families and gambling addictions to beans on toast and blind leaps of faith on to the property ladder.

“Broke is the first show we are making in a trilogy about class,” says the artistic director Jemma McDonnell.

“Armed with the statistic that the richest one per cent of British people have as much as the bottom 55 per cent, we started as we often do; by going out and speaking to people in food banks, in hostels, in charity and betting shops.

“As the 2015 General Election approaches, we’re reminded that politics should not belong to the experts; it belongs to us all. Broke opens up a dialogue about austerity, inequality, about poverty and debt and shares some of the real stories and voices behind these shocking statistics.”

Kylie Walsh, company co-founder and performer, says that when making a new piece of political work, “it’s always about what matters to me”.

“I asked that question of myself, ‘What’s relevant to me, my life, my situation?’. The answer was a four-letter word: debt. I’m in debt. I owe thousands of pounds to credit card companies: and I’m not the only one.

“There are millions of us racking up huge bills that we can’t afford to pay back, that we can barely afford the interest on. And if I find myself in this situation, in full-time work, what other stories can we unearth from across our culture? And crucially, how does the larger deficit, our nation’s debt crisis, filter down to me?”

• Tickets for the 7.30pm evening shows and 2pm Thursday and Friday matinees cost £14 on 0113 213 7700 or at wyp.org.uk