It’s just the luck of the draw. I’ve been sent to prison twice now in the past four days. Last Friday it was Clean Break’s day-long six-play epic in Soho. Last night it was an 80-minute all-male affair at the Roundhouse. Needless to say the encounters were planets apart. Men, after all, come from Mars, already primed for battle, women from Venus. Philip Osment’s Inside, however, once again provides living proof of the absurdity of such simplistic, reductive analysis. People are people. Each individual has their own story to tell and is shaped by conditions and environment and what they have or have not been subjected to in childhood. And, in this case in particular, the role fathering has or hasn’t played in the development of that individual.
Inside is an extraordinarily original journey into the male mind-set, its success lying not least in its style and presentation. Humour is its stock in trade and who ever heard of a prison drama that had audiences falling about? Ronnie Barker and Porridge apart, it wouldn’t even be worth lifting your digits to count ‘em. They don’t exist.
Well, they do now. And Osment and his associate, actor-director Jim Pope, who together make up the Playing On company presenting Inside, have just invented it. Imagine you’re sitting in on a drama workshop. Yes, it’s that well-worn, well-intentioned prison tool again. Through the interaction between Pope (who also acts the part of Liam, the workshop leader) and the group members, we begin to get to know the participants, warts and all.
On the face of it, they’re a typical bunch representative of the kind of young men who end up banged up: in large part black, not particularly articulate, aggressive. There is also one particular communality that binds this group together. They are all young fathers. As Liam attempts to confront them with the possibility of changing their behaviour through role playing and writing exercises – collectively received with various degrees of hostility and ridicule – we learn that Brownie (Segun Olaiya) is the hard-man top dog, rippling with muscles, brilliant with the skipping rope and twice as threatening. Skinny, thoughtful Tommy seems unduly under his spell. Then there is Jamal, Damian, Hasan, Aswan, Olu – all of them struggling to maintain relationships outside and defend themselves inside against peer intimidation.
Inside’s depiction of prison politics amongst inmates is horribly realistic. But what’s also on show here is how attitudes are made and the difficulties encountered in the process of trying to change behaviour that seems impenetrable and fixed in stone.
Indeed, how difficult was shown only a few weeks ago when the production, researched by Pope and Osment with an actual young-fathers group in Rochester prison and developed through the National Youth Theatre, was banned by the authorities from being presented there. How do you confront destructive behaviour unless you allow those involved to see where it leads them?
Perhaps, though, it was the humour to which they objected. The interactions are often abrasively funny, the smart-ass wisecracks recognisably derived from any street corner from Chiswick to Peckham. Yet even as we’re laughing, Inside reveals the core problem, the lack of fathering. Here are a group, themselves now responsible for young offspring. How do they want to be with their own children? Do they want to perpetuate the cycles of neglect, abandonment, physical cruelty and, in one case, sexual abuse that Liam finally manages to haltingly persuade the young men to reveal.
The production reaches its most poignant moments with these scribbled, reluctantly and, in some cases, agonisingly exposed accounts. The moment when Liam’s workshop helper, Dom (Andre Skeete), comes out to the group is gruesomely accurate in the prejudiced reaction it has upon some members. Another recalls watching the face of his father disappearing from sight as the plane that brings him to the UK lifts off and how he clung to that memory in the cold of a London morning.
Losing face, showing vulnerability - Inside explores these painful male characteristics with an admirable lack of pomposity or sermonising and a skilful sense of theatre as essentially entertaining. At once therapeutic and comic, Pope and Osment have also found a style of performance for Inside that allows the actors to appear utterly natural, as if their characters’ rough-and-tumble quips, evasions and conflicts were being improvised on the spot.
Drama can make a difference. But Inside bravely, self-mockingly ends on an ambivalent, violent note. The price of change and justice can be enormous. There are no soft, easy solutions. Fantastic performances; all deserve a mention. Michael Amaning, Jacob James Beswick, Ayo Bodunrin, Tarkan Cetinkaya, Darren Douglas, Kyle Thorne, plus lighting designer Ian Scott who makes the Roundhouse studio starkly inhospitable, its characters iconic in their spotlit or shadowed solitude.
- Inside is at the Roundhouse till November 27
