The real thing | 9 September 2009

Fathers Inside
Soho

Too True to be Good
Finborough

Oh, great. It’s one of those. Fathers Inside is a workshop-based outreach project directed by an actor/facilitator. Those last nine words encircle my heart like the clammy fingers of death. But the play is a surprise and offers a big, warm, manly handshake. It starts quietly. Seven young convicts on a drama course are getting to know each other. The atmosphere is steeped in hostility and male aggression. The dialogue feels ragged, conversational, obvious, boring even. And it’s not so much under-rehearsed as unrehearsed. This is deliberate. Life is unrehearsed, and this play’s amazing air of naturalism gradually sidelines your doubts and beguiles you into believing the actors are real people. They reveal themselves slowly, warily. Aswan is an angry black Cockney runt. Damian is a lanky, laid-back Jamaican dude. Olu is a braggart Nigerian lothario with absolutely no personal morality. These sound like clichés. There’s nothing wrong with that. Bad writing fears stereotypes and good writing embraces them because the germ of familiarity is necessary to engage our interest in a character. By day, the rehearsal room simmers with murderous resentments. By night, locked in their adjoining cells, the men shout sexually-charged insults at each other — taunts they wouldn’t dare utter in the rehearsal space for fear of physical retaliation. Paradoxically, curtailment frees them and freedom curtails them. The evolving storyline compels this mob of confused and angry rejects to absorb the bitter truth that even though they’ve been tossed on the scrapheap they still have duties to their children and to themselves. Swallowing that pill is their only chance of mastering their destinies. Responsibility is another name for hope. Written by Philip Osment and directed by Jim Pope, the play emerged from detailed research into the lives of real prisoners.