CENTRAL School of Speech and Drama students have been working on an artistic response to a coffee seller’s struggle against Starbucks

Naser Kamali – who was threatened with legal action by the global giant if he did not remove “star” from his café kiosk’s name – has met several times with a class of 16 students at the Swiss Cottage college.

They considered the values and beliefs highlighted by the issue and created a re-enactment with Mr Kamali, featuring the chant “Box, not Bucks!”

His Starbox hut, next to Swiss Cottage tube station, had operated for five years until a legal letter arrived earlier this year, also offering a £300 goodwill payment, which he ignored. Starbucks later lodged an application for a branch across the street.

MA Applied Theatre student Helen Anspach, 23, said: “One student gets coffee there every day and saw the story. We thought it was interesting to do a module on it. One of the things that interested us was that Naser did not take the £300 from Starbucks. As a Marxist, we knew the red star was very important to Naser. So we took the star – with its five points – and thought about what five things each of us could simply not do without.”