Review: LIFERS, Southwark Playhouse

If you think about prisoners at all, your mind may wander all the way back to Fletch and Mr Mackay in Porridge or, maybe, Andy and Red in The Shawshank Redemption. You might, very occasionally, spy the high walls of an inner city prison or, sent by the satnav down a bleak dual carriageway, see a sign pointing to a single lane road saying “HMP Nowheretown 2 miles”. What we almost never do is think of the people inside, right there, right now.

Commissioned by Synergy Theatre Project, Evan Placey’s dramedy, Lifers, manifests what we prefer not to see. Here are men and women with problems exactly like ones we have: age slowing down body and mind; careers blighted by underfunding and poor management; families unable to communicate, problems festering in silence. It shouldn’t be surprising that a reviewer can see over 2000 plays before these people find an expression on the stage - but it is.

Lenny is going downhill fast, his dementia slowly overtaking his mind, his legs refusing to go one in front of the other. He plays No Limit Texas Hold’em with Baxter, a cynical Jamaican who knows how to stay on the right side of everyone, and Norton, an old lag with a mouth as smart as his spirit is cruel. Mark is the young and idealistic officer (think a Mr Barrowclough, but 20-something) and Sonya the 30-something medic already broken on the system’s wheel.

If you’re thinking that you’ve seen variants of those characters before, you’re right, but the quality of the writing and, especially, the acting, makes each of them a rounded individual, allowing them to step beyond the somewhat rigid stereotype those descriptions suggest.

Peter Wight is heartbreaking as Lenny, a man full of regrets and unresolved anger about his crime, but now challenged by a mind that keeps catapulting him back to the happier days before his horrendous act. He imagines Mark as his son, Simeon, but the son he wanted, not the son he got, a lad stuck in a perpetual pre-adolescent simplicity - we guess the reason long before the reveal, though it’s no less shocking for it. James Backway manages to tread a very fine line between holier-than-thou and principled as Mark and you see that both men are getting what they need from their uneasy alliance.

Support roles they may be, but Ricky Fearon and Sam Cox have a script that allows them to do some wonderful character work finding plenty of gallows humour and bringing a specificity to the men and the environment that lifts the play from the trap of the generic. There’s no movement director credited, but it’s really very good indeed, the men continually bristling even in the most inconsequential of social interactions. Institutionalised they may be, but they’re not at ease, ever. Not for the first time, Southwark Playhouse’s intimacy is perfect for the production. 

Mona Goodwin has less to do, both her characters apparatchiks of the state, necessary for the story to work and for crucial points to be made, but with tagged-on backstories that felt a little too perfunctory. The upside of that flaw is that the play keeps us trapped on Katy McPhee’s grey brutalist set for 100 minutes all-through, giving us a taste of the characters’ own medicine.

Director, Esther Baker, is the artistic director of the Synergy Theatre Project and you can see her commitment in every one of those minutes. What she shows us works as theatre, but I’m sure there’s a measure of agitprop in the production’s conception and execution that left me wondering. With even a Labour government’s solution to the prison crisis being merely to instigate an early release scheme, letting steam out of the kettling as it were, you have to wonder about who will be listening. 

And, in the back of your mind, you know that this Anglo-American approach, with physical and mental torment and thoroughgoing neglect visited upon every single person inside those walls (the shareholders of the companies who run them do all right of course, but they’re on the outside) is absolutely not the way things are done in European prisons. Surprise, surprise, a little humanity yields much better outcomes and costs far less in the long run. 

Every Daily Mail reader and journalist should see this play - I strongly suspect that none will.      

Lifers at Southwark Playhouse until 25 October