Coming out of Leo Butler’s big, compassionate and conscience-pricking Boy at the Almeida this week, I overheard somebody speculating on whether it qualified as “poverty porn”. It’s not the first time recently that I’ve heard people using that deeply unpleasant phrase in relation to theatre shows. A producer described Yen at the Royal Court as such to me, and both Whatonstage’s Matt Trueman and The Times’s Ann Treneman used the phrase in their reviews of the same play. In the Financial Times, Ian Shuttleworth voiced his uneasiness about seeing Yen in prosperous Chelsea, saying: “This is the second time in barely six months that the Upstairs space has told us, however skilfully, that man hands on misery to man, especially in the poorer classes. It is not a helpful tendency.”

I understand that it can be troubling to sit in an expensive theatre seat – that might cost close to what some people live on for an entire week – and watch actors portray the less fortunate. I felt something similar watching Re:Home at the ultra-trendy Yard theatre in Hackney Wick, which, although geographically close, felt a world away from the people of the Beaumont estate in Leyton, whose words were being used in the verbatim-style performance. What, I wondered, would they make of seeing themselves portrayed on stage in this way?

But does that mean that the Yard should put on plays only about twentysomething hipsters, or that theatre staged in more affluent boroughs should reflect only the angst of the middle classes? Dominic Cooke’s late-noughties stint at the Royal Court certainly took a detour in that direction, with plays such as That Face.

Annes Elwy and Jake Davies in Yen at the Royal Court. Photograph: Richard Davenport

However, context always plays a part, and a play will read quite differently depending on where it is staged. I felt no discomfort at the Yard watching Alexander Zeldin’s Beyond Caring, about those surviving on zero-hours contracts – but I did watching Re:Home at the same venue.

Perhaps when Beyond Caring played the NT Temporary Space it read differently again. But I suspect discomfort arises from other things too: tone, texture, directorial decisions and, in the case of a verbatim piece, issues over ownership of the material and the way real people’s words have been used and shaped. Beyond Caring and Boy are both based on intense research, but they are fictionalised and staged in such a way that the reality they depict becomes heightened.

In any case, there’s a vast difference between offering some kind of exotic cultural safari into poverty or disenfranchisement, and reminding us that poverty is all around. Even if that makes us feel uneasy and uncomfortable – because those are not the stories that regularly get told on stage.

Life on zero hours ... Beyond Caring.

Boy is by no means an easy watch. But one of the many brilliant things about the play – from Butler’s script to Sacha Wares’ staging to the superb performances – is that it implicates all who watch it. It makes us recognise our blindness and how we only see the version of the world we want to see.

Boy serves up what we refuse to see in everyday life: all the lost boys and girls who we pass every day in the street without really taking any notice. Its protagonist Liam is the mumbling boy at the bus stop we try to ignore; he’s the kid running the tube gates who we tut, the teenager we assume is plugged into everything but who is in fact dropping beyond view in front of our very eyes.

What Boy does is to create empathy and give us some understanding of what it feels like to be Liam, adrift in a bustling city without any of the safety nets of articulacy, education, love, friendship and money that most of us take for granted. That’s not poverty porn, that’s a wake-up call we can’t ignore.