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The Pros, the Cons and a Screw

Published Wednesday 4 November 2009 at 12:20 by Pat Ashworth

Tim Elgood’s brilliant new play achieves the almost impossible in depicting a bunch of credible prisoners who aren’t caricatures and who have the power to revolt or endear. How we feel about them parallels to some extent the crime they’re inside for, which seems to be how it works in prison too.

So it’s easy to like the laid-back Irish perjurer and rock player, Kieran (Stephen Gray), and hard to empathise with the brutal hard man, Guscott, played with raw nastiness by Nick Haverson. The story is about a rock group born out of the education classes led by a feisty Scots teacher (Nicole Faraday). Shakespeare’s Othello is crucial to the outworking of the plot and there’s a lovely Dead Poets moment.

Elgood has been a qualified social worker for 35 years and the authentic narrative and dialogue are rich, ribald and impeccably timed. The anger management classes are memorable, as are the speech and body language of characters such as the lumbering, child-like Philpott (Peter Moreton) and the middle class embezzler, Boyland (Elliott Davis).

But the play doesn’t pull any punches on the grimness of prison, the corruption of the system, the collusion of the prison officers, the petty rivalries, the drugs and sex. The protagonists end up triumphant but compromised.

Francis O’Connor’s versatile set is a huge steel gantry with tiered bunks, glide-on cells and a background kaleidoscope of cutting-edge images and court reporting. Each character has an appropriate solo, passionately sung in their own defence. It’s altogether superb.

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