Jail Break

What do you get if you mix prison, theatre and a professional actress motivated by the love of God? Lucinda van der Hart finds out.

 

As I arrive at the imposing stone gates of HMP Wormwood Scrubs, I sense my stomach churning in anticipation. Awaiting a security check, I think about others who have entered this grey place before me and wonder what went through their minds? I shift from foot to foot, trying to keep warm in the sharp evening air. And then a prison warden directs me in.

My time on the inside will only be about two hours long – I’m here with 100 others to watch a performance of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in which inmates will make up the majority of cast and crew. The performance has been put on by Only Connect, a charitable theatre company using drama for the rehabilitation of inmates in London prisons. The company was founded in 2005 by drama teacher Emma Ashcroft.

Less than two years since their launch, Only Connect has run acting workshops with around 500 of London’s prisoners and put on three large-scale theatre productions in Wormwood Scrubs and Holloway prisons. Emma, 35, works as artistic director with two part time employees who are assisted by a small army of volunteers – professional actors, photographers and directors among them. Raza Jaffrey (East is East, Spooks) and Indira Varma (Bride and Prejudice) are a few of her friends to have given time to join her in prison for a day of directing.

 

Passion
‘Theatre is not just a thing for the West End’ Emma says resolutely. ‘It gets people listening to one another, thinking about motivations and working as a team. It is physical and mental and because you become almost spiritually involved in a character, it holds your attention and draws things out of you that you didn’t know were there.’

It was while studying drama at Manchester University that she had her first experience of using theatre arts with prisoners. She did a two-week residency at Risely prison, where she ran daily drama workshops. This was organised through TiPP (The Theatre in Prisons and Probation Centre), one of the UK’s main training and development agencies for theatre-arts in prisons. ‘Those were just the most ecstatic weeks,’ she says. ‘I saw a group of men arrive completely apathetic and two weeks later they were on fire. And it engaged me – it did something inside me. I began to think then – I don’t want to be a famous actress, I want to do this.’

Emma is open and frank as she discusses her work – her passion for using theatre with prisoners clearly as fervent as when she first worked at Risely. ‘For anyone to perform in front of a big audience and be applauded is a phenomenal experience – particularly if you have failed at many things,’ she explains. ‘Being witnessed by so many people is very powerful.’ She believes that through experiencing the highs of a stage performance, inmates realise that there can be highs without drugs.

Her frame is tiny, fragile-looking. She has long, straight strawberry-blonde hair and is dressed in scruffy trousers and a tee-shirt – she has just got back from a teaching session at Wormwood Scrubs. What does she make of being one of the only women among 1,500 male inmates? This doesn’t appear to faze her. ‘The fact that you are a woman is a bonus for them. Maybe it attracts them initially – naturally,’ she says in her down-to-earth manner. ‘But essentially the men are either keen to do a theatre project or they’re not. If they’re not committed, they won’t last long.’

Connection
Emma decided to call the company Only Connect after a quotation from Mrs Wilcox in E M Forster’s Howard’s End – ‘Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted.’ ‘Often the inmates have so much passion,’ she explains. ‘The company is about connecting that with the prose – grounding it.’ And Emma is a natural networker – another reason that the company is called Only Connect. ‘I love connection – whether someone is connecting with themselves, or with God – I love that electricity that happens when the connection has been made.’

So where does she stand on the debate over whether prison should be a punitive or rehabilitating experience? ‘It’s a massive thing, what should and shouldn’t be in prisons and how far it should be punitive – I sway between different views.’ But she is certain about the part that she can play in helping prisoners who want to be involved in her projects to do something worthwhile with their time. ‘There are so many hours of mulling things over that if you can help people to be focused on positive things, if you can engage their minds and give them a goal, it can be holistically constructive.’

Seeking private funding for the charity is currently the main way forward on the finance front. Prison-arts projects sometimes face the argument that there is not yet enough hard evidence to prove that the arts can reduce re-offending – which can prove a high hurdle to leap in trying to access funding. But Emma is determined to take this in her stride. ‘Everyone’s always said to me; “If you’re passionate about what you do and people like you, they’ll catch the vision.”’

Realism
For all her passion and love of connection Emma remains realistic about the challenges of her work. ‘I know the dangers and difficulties – you get really enthused about people and then they go back to crack,’ she says. ‘But I like working in a place that is not a dead cert – I don’t fit very well into neat boxes.’ She is deeply aware of her need for God’s strength and equipping for what she does. ‘All kinds of things could come against the work on a daily basis – you have to believe it will work. My faith is essential to everything and I wouldn’t be able to do this without it.’

Emma’s next goal is to expand the resettlement side of Only Connect’s work. Several ex-offenders who were involved with the charity whilst in prison have now been released – she is keen to provide them with a continued sense of community and practical help. Polly Mackean, 28, is one such ex-offender who is re-finding her feet in London life with Only Connect’s ongoing support.

 

Polly’s Story
Sitting opposite Polly in Starbucks on a north London street, I try to swallow down my surprise along with gulps of cappuccino. I can hardly believe that the blonde, vivacious woman in front of me was only recently battling a drug addiction, her life a total mess. Removing a funky parka, she begins to share her experiences of learning to act whilst serving a four-month sentence in HMP Holloway last summer.

‘I felt so nervous,’ she says, recalling the first drama workshop she attended. The last time she had done any acting was about 18 years previously, at junior school. But with time her confidence grew and then Emma asked her to play a part in Only Connect’s first production in Holloway – Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias. Polly describes the character she played, Anelle. ‘She was the new kid in town, she’s had a bit of a hard time of it… she goes through a real transformation and finds God. She gets into Christianity…’ And did she connect with her character in any way? ‘I do relate to her because I feel like I have been going through a transformation myself,’ she says.

 

God in prison
Polly’s time inside seems to have been all about transformation – both physical and spiritual. Breaking her addiction to class-A drugs was the first step. ‘I wasted, really, the last four years,’ she says. She found herself living in underground squats and turning to crime to support her habit. ‘I lost everything. I lost my house. I lost contact with my family and friends.’ By the early summer months of 2006, she was in prison for fraud and deception, and coming off drugs.

But it was a visit to court a few weeks into her sentence that triggered a real turning point in Polly’s attitude towards her time in prison. Waiting in the cells, she heard that the judge had lost his own daughter to drugs. ‘And then he was quite harsh with me, really,’ she says. ‘The sort of things he said were: “I can’t let you out to go back there” and “I need to keep you in to help you see the error of your ways and to rehabilitate you.” That day I came back from court… and I decided I wanted to make things different.’

She made a conscious choice then that she wanted better things in the future and that ‘God had a better plan for me.’ Having grown up with a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, Polly had always believed God existed: ‘…but I’d never had anything to do with Him.’ She came across a Pentecostal service in prison and discovered she loved it. One day she told Emma how much she liked the songs in the service – and a discussion about God opened up between them.

Polly’s new faith began to have an impact. ‘It’s an awakening knowing you’re not on your own – there’s always someone there with you,’ she says. She decided not to touch drugs again and wanted as little time as possible with the four other women in her cell. The play, which got her out every evening and gave her lines to learn, came along at just the right time.

 

Performance in prison
Aware of the need to keep morale high among the cast – several were lifers, and often deeply emotional during rehearsals – Emma brought in Kiwi actor Martin Henderson to teach the cast breathing exercises and voice projection. Polly laughs as she recalls the reaction from fellow inmates. ‘You can imagine in a women’s prison…that was the night that everyone came to rehearsal.’
Two weeks before the final performance, Polly was unexpectedly allowed ‘out on tag’ to serve the two-month remainder of her sentence in the community, and she moved to her mother’s home in Essex. Both she and Emma were devastated that she might not be able to take part in the final production. But staff at Holloway were understanding: ‘I was so lucky the prison allowed me to come back in,’ she says. It’s not exactly a phrase you expect to hear from an ex-offender.

For the following two weeks Polly travelled for three and a half hours daily to get to rehearsals and be back home in Essex in time for her 7pm curfew. Only Connect paid her train fares, and transported her between the train station and the prison. ‘It made the world of difference having something to do during those two weeks,’ she says. ‘Coming straight out to a seven o’clock curfew and sitting at my mum’s, bored, I could easily have got back into a downward spiral.’

Polly’s mother, sister and a close friend were among the 100-strong audience (mainly the cast’s friends and family) who came to watch the final performance. Only Connect now welcome a wider audience into prison to see their productions although security checks remain high and numbers are limited. At the close of the production ‘some people were crying, some laughing, some standing up and clapping. It was amazing to be at the end of that period of my life and to have made such an achievement.’ Polly feels that the play helped to bring healing to her family relationships – they saw how much she had changed and began to change towards her in response. ‘My mum and sister appreciated all the work that I had put in to get to that place,’ she says.

 

Life after prison
She is aware that her time in prison might have looked very different if she hadn’t come across Only Connect. Through the rehearsals she befriended others who she would never otherwise have met, and because of the contact that the company maintains with ex-offenders once they leave prison: ‘I knew that I had things waiting for me on the outside, so it wasn’t daunting coming out.’ She still meets with Emma and they pray over the phone together.
The seven months since her release have been dominated by the challenge of finding work as an ex-offender – Polly has been all too aware of her need ‘to prove trustworthy’. But it looks like the quest is finally ended – she will shortly start work in a homeless charity based in south London. And what goes through her mind as she looks back to her time in prison? ‘As hard as Holloway was, I thank God every day for what happened during my time there. It honestly saved my life.’

www.onlyconnectuk.org
Some names have been changed in this article.