The thief who took the last of an ailing George Orwell’s money from his Paris room in 1929 did a big favour to political literature.

Cast into real poverty by the sudden loss of his savings, the young Etonian writer had to search about for dishwashing work in the kitchens of the French capital. Months of hard labour as a “plongeur”, coupled with time living “the life of the road” as a tramp in England gave the future author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four the basis for his remarkable memoir, Down and Out in Paris and London.

This summer the influential ideas contained in Orwell’s first published book are to be turned into a one-off live theatrical event staged in both cities. Leading actors and writers will gather in tribute to the great English author’s brave attempt to understand homelessness and poverty.

The planned immersive performance of readings from Orwell’s book and from other key works, including his essay The Spike and his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, is to take place first in London and then in Paris, accompanied by modern testimony from refugees and rough sleepers and by poetry, musical performances and panel discussions. “It is thrilling to be able to connect to our colleagues in Paris in this joint creative and intellectual piece of work. But we are ashamed that it is so necessary,” said Jean Seaton, director of the Orwell Foundation, which has joined forces with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to run the event as a response to growing levels of homelessness in both capitals.

“Now low pay, insecure work, high housing costs, debt and insufficient benefits are pushing people to the brink,” said the Rowntree foundation’s chief executive, Campbell Robb. “The idea is to use Orwell as he would want, to build a better understanding of modern poverty and build support to solve homelessness.”

Orwell’s original words, coupled with those of today’s homeless people, will be read by a mix of leading actors, artists, politicians and campaigners throughout one whole day under the direction of Hannah Price, who said this weekend she feels honoured to be using Orwell’s thoughts as “the backbone of an immersive performance that places the shocking rise of homelessness at its centre”.

It is to be a tale of two cities put together by Libby Brodie Productions, which collaborated with the Orwell Foundation for last year’s Nineteen Eighty-Four Live event – a start-to-finish reading of the book in a single day by a collection of actors, writers and members of the public. This performance featured readings from Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Schama, Frances Barber, Melvyn Bragg, Billy Bragg and David Olusoga, among many others, and was streamed online by a worldwide audience of tens of thousands.

Once again the readings and performances will take place inside Senate House, London University’s landmark building and the architectural inspiration for Orwell’s looming Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. The event on 6 June is part of UCL’s Festival of Culture and will be live streamed, as well as filmed by the award-winning artist and film director Edwin Mingard. In Paris, where the causes and symptoms of homelessness can often take a different form, the single performance of Down and Out will take place in late September. The city is coping with a tide of international homelessness – in February volunteers found nearly 3,000 rough sleepers, many of them migrants. Paris was also a tough place to find shelter between the wars. Orwell eventually found a job at the anonymous Hotel X, but he remained unpaid for 10 days and so was forced to sleep on a bench until he had rent money.

“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work,” he wrote then, although his sympathies were firmly with his fellow “beggars”.

His resonant words on the pervasive social evil of destitution will be at the heart of this summer’s event: “The evil of poverty is not so much that it makes a man suffer as that it rots him physically and spiritually.”