Caught in the act... lags in West End play who stole away from rehearsal
IN HINDSIGHT, giving a group of prisoners the chance to appear in their own West End play always carried a risk.
Nevertheless the show’s wellmeaning artistic director declared that ‘immersion in drama’ was a ‘liberating experience’ for the seven men from HM Prison Springhill in Buckinghamshire.
Just how liberating has only now come to light. Released on temporary licence, three of the inmates slipped away during rehearsals and harassed a shop assistant in a market town, asking her out and telling her the details of a murder.
It sounds like the kind of caper that Norman Stanley Fletcher from the 1970s prison sitcom Porridge might well have had a hand in.
But it was no laughing matter for the jailbird thespians.
As punishment, the trio were removed from their open prison and, according to the Ministry of Justice, ‘sent back to tougher conditions and will spend longer behind bars’.
The men, working with the Oxfordshire-based Kestrel theatre company, were hailed as the first convicts to perform to a paying audience in a mainstream theatre.
Written by prisoners, the play – entitled Broken Dreams – was only days away from opening to the public last Friday at the Royal Court in London when the men broke the terms of their release.
All coming to the end of their sentences, the inmates had been rehearsing in a disused school in Bicester, Oxfordshire, near their prison, when three of their number decided to visit a newsagents in the town centre.
A member of staff at McColl’s said: ‘They just popped into the shop to buy some stuff like phone credits and some drinks and sweets.
‘They asked one of the assistants to meet them after she finished work and she said no. They said to her that they were in jail because they murdered a lady. They actually explained to her how they did it. She got a bit scared and called the police, who explained to her that the prisoners were not allowed to be unsupervised in the town and were supposed to have been picked up from somewhere.’
The 31-year-old shop assistant said: ‘I have been told by the Springhill prison and the police that I am not allowed to discuss anything.’
The Ministry of Justice said: ‘We have a zero-tolerance approach to anyone abusing the system.’
Under the terms of their release on licence, the prisoners did not need to be supervised but had to ‘abide by strict conditions’ including being ‘appropriately behaved’.
To fill the rather large hole in the cast, three professional actors stepped in at the last minute.
Broken Dreams, which runs for nine days, follows a group of friends who are ‘struggling with grief, guilt and the longstanding fight for justice from a housing system they believe has failed them’.