Richard Morrison - The Times
The musical Made in Dagenham is being mounted in the gym of Bronzefield and its prisoners are performing as if their very lives depend on it. Perhaps they do
The 570 residents of HMP Bronzefield — Europe’s largest women’s prison, close to Heathrow Airport — won’t be having a night out in the West End any time soon. Or for many years, in some cases. This is the establishment that houses the convicted baby killer Lucy Letby and quite a few others sentenced to very long stretches.
So next week the West End is coming to them. Courtesy of Pimlico Opera, a group that has been putting on shows in prisons for 35 years, the musical Made in Dagenham is being mounted here, in the gym of Bronzefield.
Except that this is a gym transformed. I’ve been watching performances in prisons for decades, partly because the mix of professional performers and what you might describe as “characterful” inmates invariably produces potent drama, and partly because it’s such a sobering educational experience to glimpse inside Britain’s horribly overcrowded and often violent prison system.
I’ve seen Carmen in Dartmoor, West Side Story in HMP Wandsworth, Sweeney Todd in the Scrubs and The Threepenny Opera in HMP Downview. No matter how good the show, I’ve always had an overwhelming feeling of relief that I can immediately walk out, a free man. I often think that if we gave every ten-year-old a tour of these claustrophobic, intimidating places, juvenile crime would cease.
But I have never seen a prison production on the scale of Bronzefield’s Made in Dagenham. A grandstand of stacked seating has been transported into the prison. So have dozens of crates of lighting paraphernalia, a makeshift bandroom for the 12-piece orchestra, half of a Ford Cortina and a huge LED screen on which the 1960s world of Dagenham factory workers will be evoked.
Every item, from spotlight to screwdriver, had to be checked by security guards at the prison gates. The seven professional actors, the production team, the musicians and the audience for the three public performances all need to go through the same process. Putting on a show in a prison is a massive logistical operation, and a costly one.
“Our budget for this is £190,000,” Wasfi Kani, founder of Pimlico Opera, says. “And not a penny is public funds. It’s easier that way because you don’t get comments about ‘wasting taxpayers’ money’.” Instead, Kani — one of the arts world’s most determined fundraisers in her other job, running the private Grange Park Opera in Surrey — sources a third of Pimlico’s budget from charitable trusts, a third from philanthropists (Cameron Mackintosh has been a loyal supporter) and a third from box office.
And the point of the whole thing? Time after time in prison inspection reports you read references to “lack of purposeful activity”. That, says the Prison Reform Trust, is “a direct consequence of overcrowded prisons that have lost all sense of their primary purpose, which is to create order, predictability and the opportunity to reset”.
Mounting a stage show creates a lot of purposeful activity, not just for the 15 or so inmates performing alongside the professionals — after four weeks of intense rehearsal, six hours a day — but also for the prisoners making costumes, doing hair and make-up or helping backstage.
The festering resentments that build up when so many people are incarcerated in close proximity can be dissipated, channelled into positive self-expression rather than acts of violence against themselves or others. And morale is undoubtedly boosted. Even before the entire prison population
gets to see the show (which they will before the public performances) excitement permeates the whole place. “My cellmate has a small part,” one inmate in a bike-repairing workshop told me. “Going through her lines and songs with her, I think I know the whole show backwards as well.”
And of course, Made in Dagenham — the true-life story of female sewing machinists striking for equal pay in a car factory full of overbearing blokes — resonates strongly with Bronzefield’s inmates. Whatever their misdeeds or their addictions (and one of the four giant wings of Bronzefield is entirely devoted to detoxing prisoners), many of those inside probably feel they can trace their downfall, partly at least, to the malign influence of a man.
But putting on a show would be merely tokenistic if it wasn’t part of a proper structure of education and rehabilitation. Prisons should send people back into the outside world better equipped to lead useful lives than when they came in. Far too often the reverse is true.
Bronzefield (a privately run prison, built and managed by Sodexo Justice Services) has had bad headlines recently, when cases came to light of pregnant inmates forced to undergo medical examinations while handcuffed to male prison officers.
What I saw during my afternoon inside, however, was far more reassuring. Apart from the locked doors to every corridor, the bright and airy education and business studies floor looked and felt like a well-run sixth-form college. And the atmosphere in the rehearsals for Made in Dagenham was electrifying. The level of concentration and commitment matched anything I’ve seen inside professional rehearsal spaces.
And there was something else: a feeling that strikes me every time I go to one of these prison shows (and which is captured very well in the recent movie Sing Sing, about a theatre project in the notorious New York state prison). It’s a sense that these people are performing as if their very lives depend on it. Which perhaps they do.
It’s easy to become naively optimistic when you see performances in prison. Cold statistics remind us that rehabilitation fails in many cases. Some 45 per cent of the UK’s prison population will commit another crime within 12 months of release.
“Seeing the same faces back in here is the most heartbreaking thing,” one of Bronzefield’s education team says. But that doesn’t mean projects such as Made in Dagenham shouldn’t happen. They may offer just a temporary flicker of joy and hope — but a flicker is better than nothing.