REFUGE: Dawn Garrigan: Playing for Time: H.M.P. Winchester to 16th May 2003
Refuge: by Dawn Garrigan.
Playing for Time Theatre Company, with King Alfred’s College and Clean Break Theatre Company.
West Hill, H.M. Prison Winchester 13th to 16th May 2003
Review: Mark Courtice. H.M. Prison Winchester 13 May 2003
Age old problems of crime and punishment make for involving contemporary play.Writing for a mixed company of prisoners and students must set challenges. The experience that all parties bring must be very different, and the emotional ground to be covered must take this into account, while providing something to think about.
Here too, the physical element is constrained by the gymnasium it is to be played in - add the need to cope with a constantly changing female cast (as prisoners get moved about all the time), and you have a difficult task.
This new play gets close. Set in the modern-day Winchester prison, home to ghosts and echoes of ancient miseries, Garrigan explores the controversy over the Battery, a refuge for convicted women operated by early reformer Miss Pumphrey, through the story of a convict girl in the 1870s.
The present day and the past fit together well, partly because not as much has changed as we think - but the surprise with which 1870s Amelia hears of dance classes at a modern day jail makes a neat point (as does the arbitrary cancellation of the class in the end).
Anne McKean's production coped well with the constraints, using a huge backstage team, all very well organised. The use of projections above two sides of an in the round staging re-enforced rather than opened up the “shut in” nature of the exercise.
There are some excellent performances. Elle Gritten makes the wretched Amelia interesting as well as moving. June Gordon (who sings well too), Vicky Burnell, and Mimi Frank are effective as present-day cons. Lisa Greenway does a good job with a prison officer, resisting the temptation to make her a caricature while imbuing her with the energy needed to drive the show on.
But thep iece doesn't avoid the inevitable danger, when you have a large cast of variable ability, of putting too much in. However, this is an absorbing evening, about things that matter to us all, whether prisoner or not. It's redolent of the real, lived experience of the cast whose improvisations were the basis of the play - without excluding the world beyond the high prison walls.
Clemency: June Gordon
Laura: Vicky Burnell
Stick: Mimi Frank
Jess: Rebekah Wilson
Anita Lisa Greenway
Miss Pumphrey: Laura Hornby
Ethel/New Prisoner: Joan Campbell
Laundry Woman 1: Tasha Coles
Laundry Woman 2: Carla Dorward
Laundry Woman 3 Tanya Winter
Rebellious Convict/Nancy: Pip Landers-Letts
Obedient Convict: Fran Woodcock
Prison Warder 1: Tasha Coles
Prison Warder 2: Carla Dorward
Convict with Child: Tanya Winter
Jeremy Bentham/Mr Quick/Judge: Stephen Manley
Mrs Quick: Naomi Evans
Dora: Maria Pagonis
Betty: Fran Woodcock
Amelia Drinkwater: Elle Gritten
Lawyer: Amanda Gorman
Understudies: Kate Hadley/Jenny Walmsley/Becky Large/Gemma Lyons/Rosie Coppard/Louisa Daniels/Mari Inakatsu/Noyuri Kuramoto
Directed by : Anne McKean
Designed by Alex Hoare/Nicola Ward
Historical Research by Pat Thompson
2003-05-19 00:34:45