As the TUC action of last weekend proves, we are living in protest filled times. More voices than ever are rising up against perceived injustices both at home and abroad. Into this cacophony the theatre can be heard through brilliant endeavours like Theatre Uncut, plays such as The Riots from the ever political Tricycle Theatre and performance art collective #TORYCORE.  This is where the fringe and Off-West End artists come into their own.

But while it’s vital to support these projects it is important not to lose sight of the results sought for and interrogate them. A pertinent example of good intentions gone awry was Theatre 503’s Hacked, which saw members of the public invited to have their phones ‘hacked’, forming the basis of six new plays on the scandal. But what should have been a piercing season resulted in a patchy collection of disparate pieces, more focused on the initial gimmicky idea than the issue behind it.

To this end I have been in a quandary over the upcoming Royal Court event inspired by the now infamous sentencing of the Russian feminist punk band, Pussy Riot. Claiming that they were making oppositional art as a form of civic action, these three women were jailed for staging a punk prayer against Vladimir Putin, to an outcry of international protest.

In August the Royal Court staged an event where their statements were read out to a packed Friday afternoon crowd. Now the Royal Court is again inviting people to its Wilson studio “for an afternoon of anarchic artistic expression, inspired by Pussy Riot’s iconic protest”.

This all sounds great on the surface, but something niggles. Why do this again? With attention surrounding Pussy Riot’s case at fever pitch, it cannot be to raise awareness of their plight. And yet along with new work from organiser E.V. Crowe, Yaroslava Pulinovich, Penelope Skinner, Hayley Squires and Yulia Yakovleva there will also be performances of material from the Pussy Riot courtroom trial shown.

If the injustice experienced by Pussy Riot is used as a litmus paper to ignite a discussion on this topic then this event will have served a purpose

While the Royal Court and Crowe will surely benefit from having this event so close to the run of Hero (Crowe’s own play) it would be thoroughly disingenuous to suggest that they had PR in mind when they organised it. But to avoid any such tarnishing and to make this event work politically it needs to flourish into its own form of civic action and not become just a memorial of someone else’s.

To this end I think they should put Pussy Riot’s undoubtedly powerful performances to one side and concentrate on Crowe’s own passionate call for women to “learn from their defiance, to respond actively, and above all else[for feminists] to not go back to sleep”.

The flame of feminism, though recently pronounced dead, is flickering to life on Sloane Square it seems. If the injustice experienced by Pussy Riot is used as a litmus paper to ignite a discussion on this topic then this event will have served a purpose and an admirable one – ensuring that what is at stake here is not just the validity of the Royal Court’s left-wing credentials.