"Prose and Cons" - part of "Art by Offenders"

Presented by the Koestler Trust

In the Blue Room - Spirit Level

Royal Festival Hall

London

7pm on Saturday 13th November

This was an exciting evening presenting a live reading of plays, or excerpts from plays, by offenders or ex-offenders.  They were all taken from the Synergy Theatre Project, with winners from the 2010 Koestler Awards for Play-Writing.  With a team of committed actors, who threw themselves into every piece, the work came alive as being funny, moving but always provocative with insights into prison life and offenders.  The plays were not always set in prison but were all about, in some way, the idea of being held captive to our own human nature.

The first piece "Five Women by Katie Hims was performed by women and seemed to me like "Coronation Street" crossed with "Bad Girls" in being a lighthearted take on life in a women's prison.  The play was performed with good timing and flair, with the actors being really physical in the reading, getting up and moving in amongst the audience. 

"Full English" was a two-hander play with a pair of would-be writers swapping poems in a jail cell.  Jason Barnett as Gobinomark did a very good spoken word rap in the middle of the piece that earned him a round of spontaneous applause.  "Ghost Story" was another good piece about a prisoner and his two cell-mates.  Initially comical but with a very moving twist, this piece captured the loneliness felt by many prisoners.

"Departing for the Undiscovered Country" was a disturbing piece about a tortured estate agent and his tormentor, while the evening closed on a comical note with "Tony and Lee: Brothers in Arms" ,a pair of twins who just can't stay out of crime no matter how hard they try.

All these plays are well-written enough to deserve both fuller development and a broader audience and I hope this evening paves the way for this to happen.