And I and Silence

Part born out of playwrighting workshops at HMP Morton Hall, Naomi Wallace’s short, painful prison drama uses the backdrop of racially segregated ’50s America to weave a tale of the hope that can blossom behind bars, and the despair that can destroy a life outside them.

In alternating scenes we see black Jamie and white Dee as teenage prisoners in 1950, then as ex-cons in 1959. Lauren Crace’s young Dee is bubbly, naive and full of fight; Cherrelle Skeete’s teen Jamie is a tough loner. They bond, passing the time by pretending to be domestic servants in optimistic preparation for life after release.

Nine years on and Sally Oliver’s Dee and Cat Simmons’s Jamie are edgy, nervous shadows of their former selves. The easy companionship has gone, replaced by an unsettling mix of mistrust and unwholesome eroticism. What has happened? We know the two friends were deliberately separated for the last seven years of their sentences; Wallace never explicitly shows us the process by which this separation crushed Jamie and Dee, instead coolly, cruelly leaving it to our sense of empathy to join the dots.

Less successful are the period details, which could surely have been explored more meaningfully. Still, brevity and a certain opaqueness suits Caitlin McLeod’s understated production, which gains much from the affectingly eerie performances of Oliver and Simmons, chilling and convincing as a pair of living ghosts trapped in a ghastly parody of their former friendship.