Showing @ Tron Theatre, Glasgow until Sat 15 Mar @ 19:45
Life is tough; it’s even tougher when you’ve just been released from prison into a world you barely recognise. Chloe Moss‘ tender and touching play This Wide Night, written after a series of workshops with women from HMP Cookham Wood, explores how a prisoner’s sentence doesn’t end on their release and just how elusive freedom can be.
Recently released Lorraine (Elaine C. Smith), arrives uninvited on the doorstep of former cellmate Marie (Jayd Johnson), on the premise that ‘Yer phones no workin’, ah was worried aboot ye’, but ostensibly to secure a free roof over her head. Marie has begun to build her own kind of freedom and Lorraine’s arrival serves to remind her on what fragile foundations her liberty is built.
Incarcerated behind Marie’s four walls, we watch the awkward reunion of these disparate characters: intimately familiar, but not what anyone would call true friends. Marie desperately wants Lorraine to leave, but their dependence on one another grows daily.
It is a play of tiny details and there is much of the mundane here: pizza eating, living room dancing, TV watching, but it’s this naturalistic approach that is its strength. The production is tender, frank, funny and genuinely moving. It manages to avoid falling into the trap of worthiness that seems to pervade this subject matter and to its credit, there is as much comedy as tragedy here.
Johnson and Smith deliver mercurial performances: as Marie, Johnson is in turn reticent, resentful, caring and cruel and Smith’s Lorraine is bawdy, bewildered and utterly bereft. The piece as a whole convinces, based as it is on accounts from real offenders, and the overwhelming feeling that one leaves with is of sympathy for these vulnerable and often forgotten women whose only real support outside prison is one another.