That Ric Renton’s gripping new play has the tang of authenticity should not come as a surprise. The playwright spent his early adulthood behind bars, so he is on firm ground with a drama set in HMP Durham. He has witnessed first hand the fear, desperation and violence of a Category A wing and, having discovered the English dictionary during a spell in solitary, he now writes with authority about three inmates doing time under the eye of a benign warder.
Renton has an ear for their language (the published script comes with a glossary) but also a shrewd understanding of the men’s vulnerability and volatility. While the playwright is the happy ending of his own story, he writes with realism not romanticism. There is the occasional laugh but you could not accuse him of pandering to liberal sensibilities. This world is bleak.
Less of a given is how much Jack McNamara’s production builds on the authenticity. You see it in the staging: austere and claustrophobic, making a four-hander seem cold and atomised, as if a set of monologues had accidentally collided. Verity Quinn’s set could hardly be more simple, three grave-like oblongs representing each cell. They are made pallid and grey beneath Ali Hunter’s unforgiving lighting. In this inhospitable place, even the strip lights are pockmarked. Adam P McCready’s sound design rumbles and ruptures in sympathy.
Above all, you see it in the performances. McNamara’s cast ask for no sympathy. Renton himself plays Shepherd, who is back inside after an apparently accidental violation of his parole conditions. For all his bookish aspirations, he can be surly and impulsive. That is even more the case with Ricky Shah’s Knox. In for kidnapping, he is reasonable one minute, ferocious the next.
Wittering to himself in the third cell, Ryan Nolan’s Brown comes across as a drug-addled pleasure seeker until we see the neglected child within. Even Malcolm Shields as the empathetic guard seems to be going through a crisis of masculinity.
“One off” is the term used by the guards to describe prison suicides, a detail that lends political weight to Renton’s portrait. For all their unloveliness, these are damaged men trapped in a self-destructive spiral. Subjecting them to these conditions is no cure for anything.
At Live theatre, Newcastle, until 26 November
