‘You wouldn’t think I was a free woman, would you?’ comments Brummie Lorraine wryly after being reunited with her former cellmate Marie. Indeed, one of the major themes of Chloë Moss’s new play for Clean Break, a company that specialises in ‘working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system’, is that liberty is a habit you can get out of when you spend a lot of time behind bars. When motherly Lorraine is released from prison, her first impulse is to seek out daughter-substitute Marie and, seemingly involuntarily, set up a claustrophobic idyll which turns the latter’s bedsit into a shared cell.
If ‘This Wide Night’ has some interesting points to make about the way the prison experience can become internalised, in Lucy Morrison’s production it also has a luminously humane performance from Jan Pearson, whose Lorraine begins as a ‘Little Britain’-style caricature but grows exponentially in depth and pathos as her story unfolds. Cathy Owen is likewise impressive as Marie, but her character is so closed off that she resists much sympathy – until she goes foetal in the closing moments, at any rate.
The tone of the play is almost unremittingly harsh: balloons of hope briefly float up only to be mercilessly punctured, and there’s sufficient use of the F-word to make Gordon Ramsay proud. Though it’s understandable that Moss wanted to avoid anything redolent of escapism, a little more fantasy in the presentation of the content might have been welcome.
An often hilarious and heart breaking show with superb performances from both actors. This revealing and insightful drama cracked along, and looking around it was obvious that the audience couldn't fail to be moved by the sheer emotion of the ending.
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An often hilarious and heart breaking show with superb performances from both actors. This revealing and insightful drama cracked along, and looking around it was obvious that the audience couldn't fail to be moved by the sheer emotion of the ending.