It was staged as a series of monologues and Soans admits that he and the other four members of the cast were terrified about doing it.
"For a start it is difficult to do a monologue in front of an audience where you don't have the usual props like a sofa, glass of brandy or sword. It's just you and the audience," he says.
"All of us were convinced that the audience would be bored witless but it turned into a most extraordinary occasion, and the audience was mesmerised.
"I was in the middle of one monologue about a mayor who had been having a bad time when I had the line, 'But I won the election'. The audience burst into applause: they had been hanging on to every syllable."
When, in 2000, Out of Joint revived the drama Rita, Sue and Bob Too, set on a Bradford estate, director Max Stafford-Clark had the bright idea of staging it with a companion piece State Affair about life on the same estate today.
Soans - who had had a writing success with a one man show about gambling - was called in to write it with help from the cast, talking to the real people from the Buttershaw estate.
It started its tour at the Liverpool Everyman where it had a strange reception. "I had the feeling that a lot of people walked out," says Soans.. "But at the end a lot of people clapped with their hands above their heads.
"After the show, I was told there were some people who wanted to meet me in the foyer. It was four Big Issue guys who wanted to shake my hand because I had told what life was really like and how they felt. I was very moved by that."
Later it was staged at the House of Lords, the only play to be staged there. "These people whose voices had never been heard before had ended up at the epicentre of power.
"It was performed in the room where the wallpaper cost £65 a roll and a roll of that would have saved one young man's life in Bradford where he had nowhere to stay."
