The Tricycle’s Not Black & White season gets off to a fine start with Roy Williams’ gritty prison drama. The first of three new state of the nation plays by black playwrights, it’s set in a Category B jail where no one (not the prisoners, and certainly not the screws) wants to end up - apart, that is, from new boy David who’s eager to make his mark and disrupt the somewhat dodgy but workable status quo.
Williams depicts a prison system in which the wardens turn a blind eye in order to keep the peace, and where a hierarchy of prisoners knows their place and sticks to the top dog’s rules.
Drugs are easily sneaked in, but a mobile phone is a transgression too far.
But he doesn’t flinch from portraying the pressures on prisoners, staff and the relatives who see their loved ones banged up in an institution with tough laws of its own: single mum Chandra (Jaye Griffiths) is utterly distraught knowing the treatment her young son (Aml Ameen), charged with raping his girlfriend, is likely to suffer at the hands of the inmates.
Director Paulette Randall keeps the action moving swiftly as Karl Collins’ manipulative and psychologically unstable Errol gets closer to parole, Sharon Duncan-Brewster convinces as feisty, outgoing warder Angela who knows the score and tells it like it is, and Williams (with his sharp ear for dialogue more than compensating for the contrivances in the plot) suggests that the institutionalised environment offers an unexpected if volatile refuge for guards and convicts alike.
Tricycle, Kilburn High Road, NW6 7JR Kilburn Tube (020 7328 1000) in rep to 19th December (£10 - £20.00)
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