I heard a great reaction to this new playwright, Samuel Bailey, on Saturday Review and secured a ticket. I'm glad I did. Walking into the theatre space, we find ourselves in a day room of a prison with three youngish offenders attending classes on parenthood. The play focuses on their backgrounds, inter-relationships and contrasting characters and it is all brilliantly well-acted. Above all this is a play that provokes sympathy for these young men whose lives are being wasted in confinement. All three come across as likeable people with potential whose lives have been unnecessarily blighted. Jonjo (Joseph Davies) is in for murder having lashed out at a bullying stepfather; the quick-talking Cain (Josh Finan ) is a recidivist who actually finds life inside better than the alternative; meanwhile Ryad (Ivan Oyik)is torn between being a hard man in the prison pecking order or realising his intellectual abilities by following the path of education. Indeed, this tension between a hard-man image and a softer internal world is one of the themes of the play; another is the waste of lives that prison promotes. Both could, of course be seen as sentimentalism in the case of some offenders and it is hard to say the play is making a new point. But it makes it very well and the audience clearly felt bought into the authenticity of this portrayal and the dilemmas it rehearsed.
As such I can quite see why this play had won the Papatango prize for new playwriting and received some very good reviews. Somehow, it made us feel part of the lives of these three men and able to empathise with them.
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