This Wide Night

Prison keeps criminals securely banged up in order to protect the wider community but it can give the inmates a sense of security too. Life after release is notoriously hard to handle. Commissioned by Clean Break, Chloe (umlaut on the e) Moss's unnerving play, which won this year's Susan Smith Blackburn award, describes the relationship between two very different women who once shared a cell. One has lost her mother; the other her son. Thirty-year old Marie is only just coping in the world outside. She drinks too much and sits in a daze in her small, unlovely bedsit before going out to work at night, almost certainly on the game. As soon as Lorraine is released, she comes banging on Marie's door eager to renew the relationship and terrified of being on her own.

Can this apparently ill-suited couple be friends again despite the fact that Marie isn't too pleased to see the older woman? Is it better that they are together or apart? Sometimes Lorraine seems the most needy and sometimes Marie. Lucy Morrison's production is beautifully performed by Maureen Beattie as the ungainly, shabbily dressed Lorraine who likes to crack a joke and by Zawe Ashton as the childlike, withdrawn Marie who was once told 'Not everyone can be alright, Marie. The world isn't like that.'. Both women struggle to hold chaos at bay and either could go off the rails at any moment and land themselves back in jail. The ending may be predictable but Moss sensitively and meticulously traces a relationship that is sometimes affectionate, often explosive, and always in danger of falling apart.