When Lung Theatre made their first verbatim show in 2016 about the Bradford City stadium fire, they set a template that they’ve largely stuck to for each production since: an important issue, a play based on testimonies from real people, a wider campaign supporting the show.
The activist group has spotlit young carers, the E15 mothers threatened with eviction from social housing, the alleged ‘Trojan Horse’ conspiracy to bring Islamist extremism into schools in Birmingham... Every show is built over a number of years of gathering testimony, gaining the trust of participants, and finding the best way to explore that issue theatrically – and every show has furthered the form of verbatim theatre.
But their latest piece of work, which looks at the deaths of men in HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes, many self-inflicted, is a massive leap forward and a dazzling one. Threaded between testimony from experts (writer/director Matt Woodhead spent four years interviewing prison officers, judges, prison inspectors, campaigners, even architects) are the stories of three young men who killed themselves in prison – Stephen Farrar, Chris Carpenter and Kevin Scarlett – told by their loved ones.
Four performers stand in front of storage racks, the shelves filled with empty boxes. We think they’re about to speak, but instead we hear pre-recorded voices play through speakers. Then the performers start to move, using the natural rhythms and music of words as a kind of dance score. Sometimes it’s slow and lithe, sometimes fast and rigid, the choreography determined by both the rhythm of the words, every syllable a new movement, and by its content.
The stories of the three men, and the wider horror of Woodhill’s atrocious record, have been dissolved into different parts: disembodied voices, sometimes distorted and overdubbed; a mesmerising beat-heavy score with composition by Sami El-Enany and sound design by Owen Crouch; pulsing light by Will Monks with single lightbulbs flickering along to the cadences of the speech like HAL, the computer from 2001; and that twisting, stabbing movement from choreographer Alexzandra Sarmiento.
The quartet of dancers (Tyler Brazao, Chris Otim, Miah Robinson, Marina Climent) never speak. Instead they are like the voiceless spirits of the dead young men. It’s a pretty overwhelming sensory experience and, maybe a strange word to use, a deeply elegant piece of theatre.
Previous Lung shows, while undeniably powerful, relied on appeals to emotion and intellect. Woodhill works on those levels, too, but also gets under the skin in a more abstract way. All that music, that movement, the cloud of ashes that’s tossed into the air each time the name of one of the Woodhill dead is announced, it meets the senses on a deep, aching level.
As ever with Lung, what we see on stage is only a small part of a bigger campaign, but the play itself shows a company finding a new, extraordinary way of doing justice to injustice.
