This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 40, Winter 1999/2000.
Clean Break Theatre Company was founded in 1979 by two women prisoners during their sentences at Askham Grange prison. Since then it has grown into a sizeable theatre and education company offering a range of courses and work opportunities for women with personal experience of prison or secure hospitals. Recently the company launched its new building and its latest professional theatre production. In this article, Joan Scanlon looks at some of Clean Break’s less widely publicised activities.
On one of my first visits to Clean Break one of the women on the management committee told the group of aspiring volunteers: ‘This place is a life-line for women who have been in prison. That’s because it’s a place where you can come and be treated with respect.’ She was saying this in the company’s new, specially-designed space, converted from a Victorian tie-factory in North London, with the aid of a lottery grant from the Arts Council. This same woman had first encountered Clean Break as a student when it was running drama and writing workshops from cramped premises in Kentish Town: ‘If anyone had told me years ago that I was going to do a degree, I would have laughed my head off’, she said. Whatever it led to, the point of the story was that Clean Break had been important simply because it had been there, for her and other women in similar circumstances, and because they had access to it. The critical issue is that of entitlement; the women who used the centre needed to know that it belonged to them and that they had every right to what it could offer them.
Although Clean Break is only one of a number of companies working in the area of theatre for prisoners and ex-offenders, it is unique in being a theatre company exclusively for women. The Clean Break Centre for Theatre and the Arts is an extraordinary resource for women who find their way there from various experiences of disenfranchisement, having been incarcerated by the so-called criminal justice and mental health systems. The space and facilities are astonishing: bright, airy drama and dance studios, a properly equipped theatre, a multi-media suite, a cafe… as well as a team of skilled tutors and support staff. The fact that it’s the least these women deserve doesn’t make its existence any less astonishing. At first it seems incredible that there would be growing support for a women-only company operating to redress some of the inequality and disadvantage suffered by women in every other aspect of the system. Until you realise, of course, that the combination of its emphasis on the arts and education with the Government’s interest in initiatives to tackle social exclusion makes it a likely candidate for various sources of funding. And of course these sources of funding are provisional, so that huge amounts of work are required to ensure that specific conditions are met and grants are renewed.
Behind the scenes
One of the struggles too, for a theatre company set up by and for women in prison, is to keep their initial rationale in view, and to keep the political opportunists in check. One of the women who started Clean Break in 1979 voiced this very simply at a recent event, enthusing about the new building, and at the same time expressing the hope that with the growth of the company it would manage to keep to its original purpose. ‘It was much easier, in a way’, she said, ‘when we were touring on a shoe-string’. The event in question was a reading by playwrights who had been involved with Clean Break over the years, and it was remarkable in a number of ways — not least in that these women, whose connection with Clean Break went back as much as twenty years, still felt an incredibly strong tie to the company. Moreover, playwrights are not often actors, and for many of these women it was the first time they had been called upon to read their work — and they agreed to do so for an audience of those women for whom Clean Break exists in the present. Ironically, the event itself was a testimony to the very values that motivated the women who created it: it wasn’t a public event for a wide audience, with critics and theatre aficionados in attendance; and yet (or perhaps for that reason) it was one of the most powerful performances you could ever have hoped to attend.
Clean Break activities behind the scenes are far more complicated than its public profile might at first suggest. The professional production which takes place each year has done a great deal to raise public awareness around issues to do with women and crime. Also, with its emphasis on production values and on collaboration with theatres such as the Royal Court and the Lyric, it has harnessed the interest in new writing to the advantage of women playwrights, actors and theatre professionals. But this is only one strand of the company’s work, and it has already had the eye of the media focused on it, with the success of recent productions such as Yard Gal, by Rebecca Prichard, and Mules, by Winsome Pinnock. Clean Break’s latest production, Hyacinth Blue, by Kara Miller, having toured the regional theatres, is now performing at various women’s prisons, including Askham Grange, Low Newton and Brockhill.
Every year the playwright commissioned by Clean Break undertakes a residency in a women’s prison, and every year the production returns to women’s prisons in performance. The residency is part of the writer’s research towards producing a play relevant to women’s experience of the criminal justice system, and it also provides a parallel opportunity for women in prison to undertake their own creative writing projects. Kara Miller acknowledges that the residency sharpened her understanding of the issues she was dealing with and gave her further insight into what women in prison are up against, particularly foreign black women, who are the bottom of the heap in the prison hierarchy: ‘I was encouraging these really talented women to write and not feel stomped upon.’
No luvvies here
On and off stage, Clean Break offers a challenge both to stereotypes of women in prison and of theatre and its practitioners. As Bridget Galton commented in a recent article about the company’s education programme: ‘The students and tutors at Clean Break offer an excellent answer to those sceptical souls who dismiss the theatre as full of pretentious luvvies.’ The company does not simply use theatre techniques to explore particular issues about women and crime; it involves women in the process of making theatre as a means of discovering or developing abilities that have been neglected or undermined. It also offers a means of developing skills that many women have simply not had access to or which have not been any part of the outcome of their earlier encounters with mainstream education. For this reason, the company offers literacy training and dyslexia support as well as a variety of short courses (from acting and storytelling to stage management and directing), one year access courses, specialist counselling and careers advice, and welfare services. No less important than the learning support is the practical support for women following the programme: Each student has a tailored package which includes hot lunches, travel and childcare expenses, without which many women would simply not be able to take up their place on a course. It is not just the content of the courses, or the teaching methods, but the whole framework in which these courses are provided, that makes them accessible to women who have been disempowered by life in institutions.
Breaking in
The latest education and training initiative is Breaking In, a new course which offers traineeships to women to run their own workshops and theatre projects with a view to working as independent professionals. During the ten month programme, trainees will work with young people in schools and pupil referral units across London — including those children who are seen to be at risk of social exclusion. They will also work with a professional playwright to mould a work into a performance which will tour schools and other community organisations. Finally, they will take up drama residencies in various women’s prisons. Bridget Eadie, who runs Breaking In, says that although trainees will be qualified to work with a variety of groups, most are likely to be inclined to work with vulnerable groups such as young offenders: ‘Many of the trainees know what it is like to be written off and will perhaps work hard to find things that work with more difficult children.’ All six Breaking In trainees have been through Clean Break’s basic theatre course, and bring a variety of different skills and experience to the project, and yet, as Bridget Eadie points out: ‘By anyone’s standards these women are high achievers, but it’s always going to be harder to gain employment if you have a criminal record.’ It is here that the education programme shares an explicit objective with other areas of the company’s work. Not only do Clean Break provide courses for women survivors of the prison system; they also provide employment for women ex-prisoners wherever possible. There are many women who have not necessarily come to theatre and the arts through Clean Break, or gained skills for acting or for life outside by this route, but for whom the company provides the possibility of work, as actors, writers, technicians, or in the administration and delivery of its education programme.
The final strand of Clean Break’s work, which completes the circle, is the outreach programme. It is one thing to support women to change their lives; quite another to try to change the attitudes of lawyers, probation officers and the prison service. Yet this is part of what the company is aiming to do. Clean Break offers training to a range of organisations, including many sectors of the criminal justice system, and a programme of workshops for schools, community and women’s groups. It is here that the larger project of re-education needs to take place, a project which, in a future world, might make Clean Break altogether redundant. For the present, however, one can only be glad it exists, with its simple original intention — to have the imagination to give women back the respect they are due and celebrate their resistance.
Note
In writing this article, I have drawn liberally on the Clean Break press pack, including articles by Lucy Perman (executive director of Clean Break) in Artsbusiness, Bryan Gibson in The Magistrate, Bridget Galton in Hampstead and Highgate Express and Cheryl Knights in Camden Chronicle.
Clean Break Theatre Company, 2 Patshull Road, London NW5 2LB
Tel: 020 7482 8600 Fax: 020 7482 8611