thu 07/12/2023

prison

Back to Life, BBC Three review - Daisy Haggard finds laughs in prison release

Pre-publicity for Back to Life has been all about its stablemate. This new six-part comedy comes from the same producers who brought you Fleabag, and the hope is that the Midas touch is catching. It seems unlikely, on the face of it, to follow the...

Read more...

Inside Bitch, Royal Court review - brave, hilarious yet very slender

Dear Clean Break, Thank you very much for your latest, called Inside Bitch, a show which is billed as "a playfully subversive take on the representation of women in prison". It's a great celebration of your 40th anniversary. I saw this at the Royal...

Read more...

Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, Young Vic review - shards of power amidst much that is overwrought

An entirely electric leading performance from the fast-rising Ukweli Roach is the reason for being for revisiting Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train, back in London for the first major production since the late Philip Seymour Hoffman brought his acclaimed...

Read more...

Escape at Dannemora, Sky Atlantic review - Ben Stiller's breakout drama impresses

The facts of Escape at Dannemora (Sky Atlantic) are notorious in America. Convicted murderers Richard Matt and David Sweat escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York. Indeed a less enquiring version of the story might have been...

Read more...

Papillon review - a not very great escape

The story of Henri Charrière’s gruelling ordeal as a prisoner in French Guiana and eventual escape was a bestseller on everyone’s bookshelf in the 1970s. It didn’t take long for it to become a Hollywood drama, which showcased the gigawatt talents of...

Read more...

Edinburgh Festival 2018 reviews: Home / The Prisoner

 Home ★★★★   Philadelphia-based theatre artist Geoff Sobelle has scored highly with two previous Edinburgh Fringe shows. Flesh and Blood & Fish and Fowl, way back in 2010, imagined the natural world wreaking ruthless...

Read more...

Innocent, ITV review - David Collins wants his life back

Addressing the baying media on the steps of the courthouse after being acquitted of murdering his wife, for which non-crime he’d spent the last seven years in prison, David Collins (Lee Ingleby) was a bitter and angry man. He wanted to expose the...

Read more...

Building the Wall, Park Theatre review - the nature of nightmare

Writer Robert Schenkkan’s Building the Wall imagines modern America in the not-too-distant future. The date is 22nd November 2019 and following an attack on Times Square in which 17 people were killed, martial law has been imposed. Demands for...

Read more...

From the House of the Dead, Royal Opera review - Janáček's prison oddity prompts hot tears

A political prisoner is brutally initiated into the life of a state penitentiary, and leaves it little over 90 minutes later. Four inmates reveal their brutal past histories with elliptical strangeness - each would need an episode of something like...

Read more...

DVD: The Work

“Doing work” is the phrase that inmates of California’s New Folsom Prison have adopted to describe the group psychotherapy sessions that have been run there for more than 15 years now. Given that Folsom is a Level-4 penitentiary, in which murder is...

Read more...

From the House of the Dead, Welsh National Opera review - elderly staging, music comes up fresh

This week is Prison Week in the Christian Churches, and it would be nice, if fanciful, to think that WNO programmed their revival of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead with that in mind. More likely the thinking was that it fitted well enough into...

Read more...

A Tale of Two Cities, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre review - it was the longest of times

Much loved, yes. But Dickens’s novel is probably little read by modern audiences and so a chance to see a new adaptation of this tale of discontent, riot and general mayhem set in the French revolution and spread across London and Paris in the late...

Read more...
Subscribe to prison