In the first of three plays originally staged at Soho Theatre last year, a character buys some ‘women’s teabags’ that claim to make you feel ‘consciously alive’. It’s no rhetorical cliché to say that the work of Clean Break has a similar effect, offering an insight into the lives of women caught up in the criminal justice system, and also celebrating female theatremakers.
In Chloë Moss’s ‘Fatal Light’, directed by Lucy Morrison, a grandmother gazes slack-faced from her armchair into a future without her daughter, who has died in prison. ‘Shouldn’t you have someone with you?’ she asks the shaky young policewoman sent to deliver the news, demonstrating the lack of empathy in a prison system where, as one inmate advises, ‘If you wanna top yourself or have a fucking breakdown, keep it office hours.’
Sam Holcroft’s ‘Dancing Bears’, directed by Tessa Walker, is a contagious, then vicious riff on gang culture and its effects on an aspiring footballer and his sister. Four female actors play the boys and the babymothers, each effecting the transformation by tying their hoodie into an infant bundle. It’s ‘jumpers for goalposts’ for a brutalised generation.
And in Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s ‘That Almost Unnameable Lust’, directed by Caroline Steinbeis, two lifers vividly articulate traumatic past experiences that a visiting academic has failed to draw out of them.
This is naturally beautiful writing that gets you by the windpipe. Don’t miss these a second time around.