Typical Girls, review: behind-bars tale where the music eclipses the drama
In 2021, a play by a woman writer, with an all-female cast, directed by a female director should not be noteworthy. The fact that such a production is still relatively unusual is an indication of how far theatre and society still have to travel.
All of which is meat and drink to Clean Break. The theatre company was established by Jenny Hicks and Jacqueline Holborough in the late 1970s when they met as inmates in Durham Prison. For more than 40 years, it has been addressing the neglected and complex subject of women in the prison system.
Their latest piece, Typical Girls by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm (author of the hit play Emilia), focuses on a group of five female prisoners who have volunteered for a weekly music class. Directed for Clean Break and Sheffield Theatres by Róisín McBrinn, the show is a slightly uncomfortable combination of social drama and music gig.
The dramatic element of Lloyd Malcolm’s play is a conventional combination of naturalistic dialogue and sitcom-style humour. However, its realism is undermined somewhat by the unlikely premise of prisoners preparing for a public concert of music by the (real-life) path-breaking, all-women punk band The Slits (complete with a song titled Shoplifting).
Setting that improbable proposition aside, however, the piece succeeds in both portraying the diversity of women in the UK’s prisons and the variety and complexity of the issues they face. For example, Mouth, an enthusiastic, but easily triggered prisoner from the West Country (played with immense energy by Alison Fitzjohn), is up for parole, and is caught between a desire for freedom and an attachment to the certainties of being institutionalised.
By contrast, Precious (portrayed movingly by Eddy Queens) is tortured constantly by her separation from her children, aged seven and nine. Granted access to them for a mere two hours each month, she is racked with guilt, and wonders whether it might be better for the kids if they don’t see her at all.
Lloyd Malcolm elucidates such issues through both the regular interaction of the characters and set piece monologues. However, the urgent realism of such insights grates against the virtual caricature that is the character of the music teacher, Marie.
Played by fine actor Lucy Ellinson, Marie is an almost two-dimensionally comic depiction of a well-intentioned, but wildly unprofessional arts in prisons practitioner. From her initial, cack-handed interactions with the prisoners to the implausible melodrama of the final scene, the character comes dangerously close to being an insult to the arts professionals who work in the prison system.
The unevenness of the play’s dramatic element contrasts markedly with the musical dimension of the piece. The cast are accomplished musicians, playing a series of Slits numbers, from Newtown to the titular Typical Girls, with fabulous gusto. The actor-musicians would make an excellent tribute band to the group, a fact attested to on opening night by the standing ovation that followed their closing number.
Until Oct 16. Tickets: 0114 249 6000; sheffieldtheatres.co.uk
