Women and Carceral Society

Vivien Stern articulates the ubiquity of prisons: ‘Everyone has them. It is as normal to have prisons as to have schools or hospitals’ (Reference Stern1998: xx). However, despite the growth in the international prison population – the latest figures from the World Prison Population List (2021) report over 11.5 million incarcerated people – people’s access to prison and their knowledge about it is largely mediated and shaped through cultural representation rather than personal experience: news and documentary footage; memoirs and novels; television and film ensuring that the symbolic power of prison has become ‘as much a basic metaphor of our cultural imagination as it is of our penal policy’ (Reference GarlandGarland, 1990: 260).

Whilst the definition of carceral relates to, or of, prison, carceral geography makes explicit the myriad ways in which prison – as penal policy, site and metaphor – seeps across a material perimeter to produce disciplinary techniques which shape subjects beyond it (Reference Dominique, Turner and SchlieheMoran, 2018; Reference RoutleyRoutley, 2017). A carceral society is one where the carceral ‘reaches all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society’ (Reference FoucaultFoucault, 1977:298), rippling from the prison to the social body as a whole (Reference Dominique, Turner and SchlieheMoran, Turner and Schliehe, 2018: 669). For example, a prison sentence may be time- and place-specific; however, the shame and stigma attached to it endure long after a sentence has been served. Carceral geography’s examination of ‘who and where is governed through carceral logics and the precise forms that these take, as well as the subjectivities produced through these processes’ (Reference RoutleyRoutley, 2017) informs our consideration of Clean Break’s practices as a critique of and resistance to carceral society and penal spectatorship (Reference BrownBrown, 2009, Reference Brown and Scott2013).

Further, despite the many cultural variations in the development of prisons across the globe, there is one constant: men have always been the majority. Currently, women make up 6 per cent of the global prison population (PRI, 2021). Research into the experience of women in the criminal justice system from law, feminist criminology and prison studies confirms that, as a direct consequence, women are marginalised because of their gender, because they have been criminalised and because they are the minority (Reference AgozinoAgozino, 1997; Reference McIvorMcIvor, 2004; Reference SharpeSharpe, 2012). This lack of consideration of women’s specific needs is summarised by Ramsbotham during his tenure as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Prisons (1995–2001), ‘It is not merely a question of women receiving equal treatment to men; in the prison system equality is everywhere conflated with uniformity; women are treated as if they are men’ (1997: para. 3.46). This failure to recognise the need for different approaches is evidenced in ideologies that inform the language of the law (Reference KennedyKennedy, 1993, Reference Kennedy2018), the architectural design and material conditions of women’s prisons (Reference Moore and ScrantonMoore and Scranton, 2014) and the endemic political inertia that impedes penal reform attending to the needs of women, communities, and society (Reference CorstonCorston, 2007; Reference McCorkelMcCorkel, 2013). The feminisation of poverty (Reference BradshawBradshaw, 2002), the elision between welfare policy and penal policy and racism (Reference WacquantWacquant, 2011) means that women are particularly vulnerable to political forces of regulation and punishment.

The particularity of women’s experiences is detailed in Clean Break’s rich repertoire of plays. The following offers an introductory snapshot of the range and nuance of this work. Paulette Randall’s 24% (Reference Randall1991) examines the systemic racism that shapes the lives of young Black women, within and beyond the criminal justice system; the issues faced by characters navigating complex mental health needs in a system that fails to address them is dramatised in Sarah Daniels’ Head-rot Holiday (1993), set in a special secure hospital, and echoed twenty years later in Vivienne Franzmann’s Sounds like an Insult (2015). Mules (1996) by Winsome Pinnock traced the drug trafficking routes between the UK and Jamaica, exposing a system that pushes the most excluded women to try and find a way out of poverty. A decade later, Lucy Kirkwood’s, it felt empty when the heart went at first but it’s alright now (Reference Kirkwood2009), invited audiences to think about the implications of sex-trafficking when they witnessed Dijana, a young Croatian woman, trapped by debt, grief and, despite all the evidence to the contrary, hope for an alternative life. Joanne (Reference Bruce, Ikoko, Lomas, Odimba and Sarma2015), by Deborah Bruce, Theresa Ikoko, Laura Lomas, Chino Odimba and Ursula Rani Sarma, is a play that captures the multifaceted landscapes Clean Break addresses by staging the final twenty-four hours in the life of a young woman after she is released from prison. We never meet the eponymous Joanne, but aspects of her life are revealed through the testimony of five women, played by the same actor (Tanya Moodie in the original production). Each of these five characters has a role to play in organisations and institutions that Joanne comes into contact with before and after prison: school, the police, the NHS, a charity that supports prisoners as they prepare for release and a hostel which provides accommodation for homeless prisoners. Joanne exemplifies Clean Break’s commitment to nurturing state-of-the-nation plays that depict the lasting impact of the societal and political neglect of women who come into contact with the criminal justice system. In brief, Clean Break’s plays disturb and disrupt assumptions about women, crime, punishment and justice, inviting audiences to be aware of and take responsibility for the narratives they witness, perpetuate or question.

In Section 1, we interrogate the origin story of Clean Break, focusing on the narrative of two women founders within its collective beginnings, to reflect on how this story has been told at various times in the company’s history and to what ends. We consider the ways in which the company positioned itself in relation to wider contemporary practices, especially feminist theatre and the women’s theatre movement of the late 1970s and 1980s, and assert that the alternative theatre movement is an under-acknowledged antecedent of what we now refer to as prison theatre and socially engaged theatre. Rather than consider Clean Break being founded in one moment by two people, we come to think about founding as an iterative process over time.

In Section 2, we review these wider structures and processes within Clean Break’s education and engagement activities, identifying the personal and political work courses offered. We assert how education functions as a practice of endurance across the company’s work; paying particular attention to the longevity of Clean Break and the role of education in its work supporting women who encounter the structural violence of the criminal justice system. We identify how the company has endured in the face of an increasingly hostile landscape and persistently fought to maintain a space in which criminalised women can access agency and creative imagination. We map how the company adapted in the light of government policy, funding, and organisational changes to consider how Clean Break has secured both a site (a purpose-built organisational home) and developed models of organisational practice which promote endurance.

In Section 3, we consider how Clean Break, through its varied theatre practices, disrupts an understanding of the social and political power relations that impact women, crime, and justice. We draw on Clean Break productions and archival materials from across five decades (Killers, Decade, Inside Bitch and [BLANK]) and engage with Pat Carlen’s ideas of the ‘criminological imagination’ (Reference Carlen1983, Reference Carlen2019) and ideas of social epistemology (Reference Brady and FrickerBrady and Fricker, 2016; Reference Fricker, Rik and MartijnFricker et al., 2016) and epistemic injustice (Reference FrickerFricker, 2007, Reference Fricker, Rik and Martijn2016) to consider some of the ways that Clean Break’s attention to women’s experiences of criminalisation develops new understandings about prison as a fabrication of social control and power relations in carceral society. We argue that Clean Break’s work is an act of feminist social epistemology, with theatre practices expanding audiences’ ‘knowledge, information, belief and judgement’ (Reference Miranda, Graham, Henderson and HendersonFricker et al., 2019: xvii) about women and criminalisation.

Our access to cultural narratives about women within the criminal justice system, particularly through television and film, gives us the impression that we know something about their lives and experiences. Fictional narratives featuring women in police custody, court and prisons are readily available on our screens and in our mind’s eye. Criminologists, particularly popular criminologists, evidence the power of cultural representations as systems of knowledge circulation in generating public knowledge about crime, criminals and punishment (Reference Rafter and BrownRafter and Brown, 2011). However, popular criminology has not engaged with theatre as a system of knowledge generation. Across this Element, we consider how Clean Break’s work contributes to a popular criminological understanding about prison and women’s experiences of it – prison not only as a site but also as an idea which, literally, is a fabrication of power relations in carceral society.

For more than forty years Clean Break has survived seismic shifts in Britain’s social, cultural, political and economic landscape to create structures and practices that have had a significant impact for criminalised women and public understandings of the sociopolitical impact of their experiences. This Element examines Clean Break theatre company’s origins and practices to consider not only what Clean Break does but how it does it.

1.1 An Alternative History

The 1968 Theatres Act abolished censorship of the theatre; the Lord Chamberlain’s role, which, since 1737, had been to decide what was and wasn’t fit to be licensed and seen by the public, was made redundant. Prior to this, theatre was dominated by practices that generated and maintained hierarchical structures in the creation, production and management of work. Capitalist models ensured a pyramid of power where a small number of people made decisions about what narratives and lives were represented and those that were not; about who was employed and who was not. The authority of the writer and director was privileged (Reference RebellatoRebellato, 1999, Reference Rebellato2013; Reference ShellardShellard, 1999). There was a robust economy of building-based companies such as the Royal National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and West End theatres staging large-scale productions with ‘networks of provincial and repertory theatres, which were complemented by a number of “Little Theatres” or “arts theatres”’ (Reference JonesJones, 2021: 1).

However, with the abolition of censorship came the rise of alternative, political theatre, with its outcrop of countercultural companies that flourished throughout the 1970s (Reference CraigCraig, 1980; Reference DiCenzoDiCenzo, 1996; Reference ItzinItzin, 1983). Alternative theatre groups upended assumptions about the role of theatre in society; about which stories, subjects, and lives were deemed important to represent; about who got to make work; and the means by which the work was made. Maria DiCenzo warns against, ‘lumping together all left-sounding theatre groups, into one broad continuum, [as it] submerges critical political differences in the name of unity’ (Reference DiCenzo1996: 18). Although it is important to recognise the very different political ambitions of the companies that evolved during this time, there are some shared characteristics that connect them – characteristics relevant to Clean Break in its formative years. These include how the work was predominantly small-scale and made by companies explicit about the politics that shaped their theatre (e.g. Gay Sweatshop, Welfare State, Theatre of Black Women). Another common feature related to the way in which not all company members had training or experience in theatre, but all were committed to the possibility of social and political change through it. The themes of the work reflected the sociopolitical concerns of the group. For example, Black Theatre Co-operative portrayed life from a Black perspective in the UK (Reference Goddard and DonnellGoddard, 2002) and Inter-Action created an eclectic and responsive range of arts interventions in the lives of communities (Reference ItzinItzin, 1983). Many of the companies modelled collective decision-making and shared responsibility in the devising, writing, and producing of work; rather than assuming that audiences would come to designated theatre buildings, there was a commitment by companies to take the work to where people already gathered – in community and educational spaces in rural as well as urban environments.

For many alternative-theatre companies post-show discussions, often in the venue’s foyer or bar rather than onstage, were a key strategy in audience engagement to increase awareness of the specific challenges faced, and political advocacy for the communities they represented. Post-show conversations were an integral part of Clean Break’s practice:

In an interview in 1979, company member Sasha Hutchinson noted the significance of the post-show conversation for the company: ‘They usually get round to asking us what we did and what prison was like. Then they discover that we aren’t a different species’ (Reference HarkerHarker, 1979). Similarly, these post-show discussions also provided spaces for women to build connections, with members of the audience frequently standing up and declaring their own experiences with the criminal justice system. The post-show moment was a significant part of the theatre event, an opportunity to deepen understanding of the experiences of incarcerated women involved in the performance and advocate further for the political mission of the company to improve public understanding of criminalised women.

In brief, these alternative, collective and collaborative modes of theatre making, in principle if not always in practice, were bound up with the political and aesthetic agendas of theatre companies. Whilst most of the companies detailed in Itzin’s extraordinary British Alternative Theatre Directory of Playwrights, Directors and Designers (Reference Itzin1983) are no longer in operation, there are many artists and a small number of companies, including Clean Break, who were part of this movement that continue to make explicitly political, socially engaged and applied performances in the early twenty-first century.

Figure 1 Clean Break Women’s Theatre Company Image

(1980)

That Clean Break emerged as part of the UK’s alternative theatre movement is an ‘origin story’ overlooked by alternative-theatre histories. Equally, Clean Break’s relationship to alternative theatre and histories of collective modes of creation has not been particularly present in the company’s own discussion of its practice. Furthermore, an elision of Clean Break’s alternative history has occurred through the more recent attention given to the company’s strand of education work and the way in which Clean Break has come to articulate the benefits of this with reference to social inclusion and criminal justice outcomes (see Section 2). Hence, it is not surprising to find that the company is now primarily considered in the context of applied and social theatre. Today, on UK Drama degrees, at undergraduate and master’s level, Clean Break receives most attention through the lens of applied theatre scholarship which is a referent for UK applied theatre practice. But to recollect Clean Break’s early years as a group of non-hierarchical, collaborative theatre makers, is to recognise the relationship of applied performance to a radical genealogy of performance making, thereby challenging understandings of UK applied performance genealogies as predominantly associated with the government emphasis on social inclusion in the 1990s, which sought to deploy culture to change the behaviour of marginalised or excluded individuals through arts interventions.Footnote ³ In short, to recognise how Clean Break was more embedded in circuits of alternative theatre, performing at The Drill Hall Arts Centre and The Women’s Arts Alliance Women’s Festival and sharing stages with companies such as Split Britches, Gay Sweatshop, Spiderwoman, and Sadista Sisters, is to reaffirm their genealogical connections to an alternative theatre history.

1.2 Complicating the Origin Story

Beyond locating the organisation’s historical lineage within broader artistic and social movements, we are also interested in understanding the internal organisation of the company in its early years. Clean Break Theatre Company’s origin narrative, articulated across all areas of its current artistic, educational and advocacy work, and reiterated in scholarship, identifies ‘two women’ as the founders of the company (some indicative examples of this narrative appear in Reference DevlinDevlin, 1998: 343; Reference GoodmanGoodman, 1993: 205; Reference GuptaGupta, 2002: n.p). This narrative is reiterated in the company’s current website in the ‘About Us’ section: ‘Clean Break was founded by two women in prison who believed in the power of theatre to transform lives’ (Clean Break, n.d).

Conversely, some of the company’s promotional materials from their first decade complicate this ‘two women’ founder narrative by articulating the emergence of the company as a collective of women, also often referring to them as a drama workshop. For example, the Avenues programme states: ‘Clean Break is a dynamic and truly unique women’s theatre company, founded in Askham Grange Prison by serving prisoners in 1978 and continued as a workshop and touring company of women ex-prisoners since 1979’ (Clean Break, 1982).

The collective approach of the group is further affirmed by Hicks and Holborough in their early letters to Susan McCormick, the governor of HMP Askham Grange, who became a friend, advocate and, arguably, a producer for the company: ‘On reading the Guardian article [you sent to us] I was struck by the refence to lacking discipline in many women’s groups: being terribly indulgent with each other and letting everyone do their bit, which is exactly how we work’ (Reference HolboroughHolborough to McCormick, 1979b).

This disjuncture between the entrenched narrative of Clean Break emerging from the work of two women, who are at various points anonymised or named as Hicks and Holborough, and the pairs’ own articulation of the collective endeavour of its early years, prompts a reconsideration of the role of the founder, the timeframe for founding and a reorientation of Clean Break’s history as part of a movement of collective theatre-making practices.

It was in 1977 that Jenny Hicks and Jacki Holborough first met at ‘H’-Wing – a high-security unit for women within Durham Prison, a site that housed incarcerated men. In an interview, Holborough recalled their first meeting:

There followed some tentative efforts to create a performance, notably Holborough recounts a group of women gathering regularly to sing along to a Jesus Christ Superstar cassette tape with the hopes of performing the show in the yard, but staff at Durham Prison soon shut this down as a security risk (ibid).

It was when Hicks and Holborough met again later at HMP Askham Grange, an open security prison in North Yorkshire, that Clean Break mark their formation. The prison already ran an annual Christmas pantomime performed by incarcerated women (with regular guest appearances from prison staff and the local vicar) for an invited audience, including locals from the villages of Askham Bryan and Askham Richard (Yorkshire Evening Post, 1978). In 1978 the pantomime Goody Two Shoes, was performed by a cast of forty women including Hicks and Holborough. At the start of Reference Hicks and Holborough1979, several of the women involved in the performance approached Susan McCormick, Askham Grange’s Governor, to ask for permission to continue a regular theatre workshop after the pantomime finished. McCormick encouraged the women’s ambition with around twenty of them attending weekly theatre sessions to explore different playtexts (by Joe Orton, Spike Milligan, and Agatha Christie) and ultimately write their own work (Reference Hicks and HolboroughHicks and Holborough, 2020). Holborough notes, ‘what started off as a bit of fun and defiance of the system became something much more radical and personal when the women decided to write their own material: material that was “something about us”’ (Reference Hicks and HolboroughHicks and Holborough, 2018). The theatre workshop became a space for shared devising and co-creation.

With the support of McCormick, the group, while still incarcerated, staged Efemera at York Arts Centre in 1978, under the company name ASK’EM OUT. Efemera exemplifies the company’s collective beginnings – its six acts of varying lengths devised and performed by twenty-one women involved in the prison’s theatre workshop. There was also a strong musical component to the show with nine songs and four musicians involved. Ros Davies, the music teacher at HMP Askham Grange, was a key ally and collaborator. The series of scenes and songs was held together through the framework of a newspaper room and a sharing of stories. This two-hour production was the first performance staged outside of prison by a group of incarcerated people in Britain.

While the women were given special dispensation to leave the prison in the evening to do the two shows, the Home Office required that the performances were not advertised as created and performed by women serving prison sentences. Instead, the freesheet for the performance reads: ‘ASK’EM OUT is an ad hoc group of women from a wide variety of social backgrounds, never to be together again, and local only for a short time’ (Efemera, 1978). The listed cast names also offered a tongue-in-cheek indication of the company’s history, including Miss de Meanour and Miss Phitt. Indeed, there was an appetite and interest from the public to understand what women in prison had to say. As Holborough recalls, the mandate from the Home Office did not hold for long:

Holborough’s reflection on the first public performance by the women who would later become Clean Break, affirms the collective emergence of the company. She speaks to the ‘we’, the group, and the realisation of this brilliant thing: ‘a women prisoners’ theatre company’.

Figure 2 Efemera (1978) Company Programme

This opaque introduction of the company to the public underscores the complexities around visibility that are enmeshed in Clean Break’s work. As previously noted, identity politics played a crucial role in the formation of many alternative companies. In the case of Clean Break, women were making visible their experience with the criminal justice system, which at this point in the company’s history generally meant women had lived experience of the system. In many ways, founding also lies in a naming and a willingness to be named as a founder of a women prisoners’ theatre company. Indeed, at different points in the company’s history the naming of Hicks and Holborough as the two founders has changed. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s in company narratives and wider scholarship the pair were only referred to as ‘two women in prison’. We propose this is due to a mixture of factors: the pair undertaking other professional endeavours and a desire for their position as founders not to tie Clean Break to one idea of what it could be. But during the company’s first decade in existence, Hicks and Holborough stood firmly as Clean Break Women and continued to make themselves visible to funders, arts organisations, press, and audiences in order to engage wider publics in their work.

Following the production of Efemera, a letter from Jenny and Jacki to Susan, with a capitalised ‘CLEAN-BREAK WOMENS THEATRE COMPANY’ at the top of the page, moves beyond imagining the possibility of a theatre company made up of prison experienced women, it is a declaration that it already exists:

This letter is the first formal articulation of the company that would become Clean Break. It illustrates the clarity of the company’s desire to ‘be together again’ and Susan McCormick’s unacknowledged role as the first producer of the company. By facilitating the communication between women still serving sentences and those who had been released, McCormick collaborated with Clean Break in its transition from a prison drama workshop to a theatre company that, months later, was presenting work at the Women’s Arts Alliance Festival and Edinburgh Fringe.

Clean Break began as a collective, or co-operative, whereas now it is organised into departments with section heads, reporting lines and a senior leadership team. Yet, in the face of successive waves of personnel changes and business models, Clean Break has retained a continuity in terms of its objectives and spirit. The contemporary company, working in a transformed political, technological and funding landscape, can be understood as not only connected to, but also as the result of, its original incarnation. This point is made more specifically by Reference ZerubavelZerubavel (1993: 458), who states that: ‘Examining the way groups construct their beginnings is … indispensable to any study of the development of collective identity’. Further, as Reference GodardGodard (2013) emphasises, institutional norms have deep roots in particular historical conditions. These norms are ‘cognitively embedded in the way actors think about institutions, and are structurally embedded in the design of institutions and the distribution of power resources’, resulting in, as Reference Thelen, Morgan, Campbell, Crouch, Pedersen and WhitleyThelen (2010) has argued, the ‘constraints and opportunities’ within which choices are made. It is arguable that the origin story of Clean Break has been mobilised both externally and internally: the two women’s experience speaking to a transformational power of arts practice in carceral environments and the emergence of the company from women with lived experience maintaining a level of legitimacy. We see this framing of the origin narrative as key to enabling disparate personalities to work through the everyday challenges of maintaining a successful organisation. No matter what the profile of the two founders has been in terms of Clean Break’s ‘origin story’ for both internal and external audiences, the shared, collective dimensions of the early years seem to still animate and inform decision-making in the company today which is unusually collaborative for a hierarchical organisation. A path was set, one shaped by the alternative theatre movement and by women’s politicised understanding of their place in society during the 1970s.

1.3 Founding as an Iterative Process

Maria DiCenzo asserts that the collective structures of alternative-theatre companies were an attempt to democratise production processes and reflect a wider politics of equality that many companies were thematically addressing in their work. While both Hicks and Holborough were keen to assert the significance of collaboration in the early years of the company, they did note their own individual commitments to administrative, fundraising and producing tasks, to continue developing the company:

As DiCenzo identifies, for companies involved in the alternative theatre movement, ‘It was common […] to maintain some division of labour – making use of the skills and talents of individual members – but with a strong emphasis on preserving a democratic work environment’ (Reference DiCenzo1996: 56). Working as a co-operative still facilitated company members to lead in certain areas. As Holborough states, ‘I mean it is true that Jenny and I did most of the admin, because I think we just wanted to keep powering it on, we didn’t want it to stop’ (Reference Hicks and HolboroughHicks and Holborough, 2020). The affirmation of Hicks and Holborough as founders in Clean Break’s company narrative is, we argue, inextricably bound up with this continuing commitment to ‘power it on’, through undertaking the administrative work that supported the company to continue its artistic practice. For example, as the material held in the company’s archive evidences, in the first decade of the organisation’s existence the letters to trusts, funders and theatres are all from Hicks and Holborough, advocating for the work on behalf of the women.Footnote ⁵ Beyond the artistic vision of the company, it is this volume of administrative labour that further affirms the pair as founders in the company narrative, the persistent grinding work of applying for funds, contacting venues and arranging accommodation. It is this labour that is captured in company records and thus becomes a legible part of its history.

The following selection of extracts from letters from Holborough to McCormick over the course of four months in 1980 illustrates something of the intermittent momentum of the early days of the company, indicative of the self-organising collective:

This commitment to keep powering the collective illuminates that founding is not just a single act, or an artistic vision, but a sustained and sustaining practice which, as Holborough’s letters illustrate, can be challenging to bear because of material, political and personal circumstances. In histories and lineages of applied theatre it is important to recognise this more complex conceptualisation of founding, one that (in this instance) recognises the radical collective models of practice that are a significant antecedent to applied practice, while also acknowledging a temporally expanded understanding of founding as a practice that takes years. In this expanded iteration, founders inscribe themselves in company narratives not only through their artistic vision, but also through the administrative and material labour of driving a company forward. This is illuminated by the company’s archive, the early years of which consist mainly of letters, budgets, funding applications, and newspaper clippings from Hicks and Holborough. As contemporary applied and community performance practices increasingly explore models of collective creation and a return to practices of cultural democracy is increasingly emphasised, it is useful to reiterate the significance of collectivity in the field’s lineage and identify the ways in which such structures might affirm a particular politics, while also underscoring the need for members of any collective to take on roles to ensure the organisation is sustained.

Founding is not just the declaration of an idea – it is an iterative, enduring commitment to the realisation of it. The founding of Clean Break might then be understood as occurring over the course of a decade with Hicks and Holborough a constant energy behind the company during this period. Holborough left in 1986 to take up a writer-in-residence role at The Bush Theatre; Hicks, after cultivating funding and structures to secure a permanent home for the company, departed in 1990 to become the co-director of Women in Special Hospitals. As Hicks explained:

In this instance, founding then becomes a material act which Hicks articulates as creating a physical home for the company which has been a significant factor in Clean Break’s endurance.

Figure 3 Clean Break Theatre Company with the Mayor of Camden outside HMP Holloway, 1986.

While there was a stable core of Clean Break Members throughout this founding decade – whose names are recorded in the archive but not the public histories of the company – there was also fluidity to the group. In the archival materials, there are around ten other women who emerge as key to the creative development of the company’s work in their first decade: Eva Mottley, Sasha Hutchinson, Krissie Stephens, Caroline Needs, Susie Davies, Gwen, Cheryl, Sarah Newton, Adrienne McCloud, Lizzie Bristow, Jock Johnson and Chris Tchaikovsky. More broadly, Holborough stated in an interview with Susan Croft that the company worked with around fifty women during their first eight years (Croft, 2013). Some of the early company members left, having developed personal interests and professional skills (theatre and television writing, acting, teaching, therapy), others returned to prison, and some died, the result of drugs or suicide. By the late 1980s, the necessarily ‘messy-collective’ had dispersed and Clean Break became a theatre company with a management structure with discreet and designated roles. Increasingly Clean Break employed women who were sympathetic to the mission of the company rather than women who had personal experience of incarceration.

1.4 Company Narratives and National Agendas

Complicating the origin narrative of Clean Break expands understandings of what it might mean to found a theatre company and enables the company’s position within the lineage of UK alternative theatre movement to become more explicit. Clean Break’s body of work tracks against the wider priorities and parameters created by changes in cultural policies and funding, ideology and reception. In the late 1980s, Clean Break Women Prisoners Theatre Company became Clean Break Theatre Company. By dropping ‘Women Prisoners’ the company was explicitly acknowledging a change in the organisation’s structures and decision-making practices. The collective of women with experience of prison became a company with employees whose politics aligned with the mission of the company, rather than women who had personal experience of criminalisation and incarceration. These fundamental changes were largely due to shifts in arts funding and wider theatre industry practices where hierarchical management models were normalised and expected.

In 1992 the company implemented a more structured staffing model following Alexandra Ford’s appointment as Company Administrator. At the same time, the company also began to expand its education programme, starting with the writers in residence programme in 1993 and growing to include education and outreach strands from the early 2000s (see Section 2). Indeed, under the leadership of Lucy Perman (1997–2018), Clean Break’s practice became synonymous with these education and outreach practices. During this period, the company hugely expanded its training provision for women in the community and its outreach work across different prison sites, as well as growing the artistic strand of its work. Positioning the work of the company as creating opportunities for artistic and personal development aligned with key funding principles in the UK arts sector in the early 2000s.

In this new model, strands of work were separated into ‘Artistic’ and ‘Educational’. Clean Break commissioned plays from professional writers which were performed by professional actors, rather than being devised, written, and performed by women with lived experience of the criminal justice system or at risk of entering it. The Education programme primarily supported the personal and professional development of women, at this time termed Students (considered in Section 2). In the early 2010s, the sharp distinction between ‘Artistic’ and ‘Education’ was bridged through an ‘Engagement’ programme which involved centred on work with women who were incarcerated but also included writers in residence producing short plays, which were performed by Students.

In 2017, the commitment to collapse the boundaries between artistic, education, engagement and leadership strands of Clean Break’s work, began the work of envisaging the most recent iteration of the company. Subsequently, in 2018 Clean Break underwent a significant restructure and refocused their work with women – now termed Members – to centre on their theatre practice. It is important to note that this was in part due to significant funding cuts at a local authority level, which contributed to the decision to close much of the education programme. Equally, in the cultural sector at this time there was an increasing turn to cultural democracy and collective theatre making. In this context of reduced funding and a turn to genuinely collaborative models of practice, Clean Break made a clear commitment to, once again, place Members’ artistic work at the centre of the work the company do. Significantly for our discussion here, this change has shifted the articulation of the founders once again:

It is notable that it is in this moment that the founders and their work are located within radical creative activism, which has once again become more legible in the company’s articulation of its own past. While the focus on ‘two women’ remains, there is a recognition of other women and a desire to build a ‘community of women artists’. This feels like an echo of the ambiguously collective beginnings of the company over forty years ago.

In sum, Clean Break’s founding, and founding narrative, are important in several ways. Momentum was created and sustained by a group of people committed to a way of doing things for shared purposes. This was then sustained through the actions of two central individuals. Their responsibilities were essential to the establishment of Clean Break, but the way in which they were undertaken was subordinated to the idea of the collective and its aims. Scholars of applied and socially engaged theatre need to be aware of the prisms that origin stories are refracted through and attend to what they reveal about histories of work in this field. In Clean Break’s case, this includes the articulation of the company as ‘started by two women prisoners’ offering the company legitimacy and authenticity during a period where social inclusion through cultural practice was being uncritically embraced. This disjuncture between the company’s emergence as a collective and the centrality of Hicks and Holborough as co-founders in Clean Break’s historicisation and contemporary articulations of the organisation’s identity, provokes a wider consideration of the radical lineages of contemporary practices gathered under the umbrella term ‘applied performance’.

2.1 Structural Shifts, Education and Endurance

It was in the late 1980s that the company underwent a significant structural and ideological shift in how it operated. Draconian cuts to arts funding saw many theatre companies having to streamline operations; hierarchical management structures were normalised. In the case of Clean Break, this climate of economic hardship led to the dissolution of the collective as a working model (for both the creation and producing of work), which was replaced by an organisation of individuals with distinct and separate roles. This shift from a collective of prison-experienced theatre makers and activists to a professional theatre company with discrete areas of activity was particularly explicit in the separating out of the ‘artistic’ and ‘educational’ strands of the company’s work.

Formerly, in the 1980s, the company ran education and training workshops for its Members. These included Naming Ourselves, a series of workshops led by Bonnie Greer ‘specifically for women from ethnic minorities […] to explore Black experience in a racist criminal justice system, as well as reclaiming past experience and the self’(Clean Break, 1989); Stepping Out, run in collaboration with Spare Tyre theatre company, attended to issues of life after release; and a New Writing programme, where a panel of theatre professionals, including Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker, offered critical feedback on work submitted by women with experience of prison (ibid). However, as the artistic programme developed with the commissioning of plays by professional writers, performed by actors, touring to regional theatres, the education programme focused specifically on developing programmes and structures of support in Clean Break’s purpose-built, women-only centre in North London.

From the early 1990s until 2017, Clean Break developed a unique and (from the early 2000s) formally accredited education programme for women with experience of the criminal justice system. The company issued a range of diploma-equivalent qualifications, most consistently accredited by The Open College Network. At its height, the education programme consisted of over thirty courses. Some of these were more craft-focused – performance training such as Voice Skills, Movement for the Performer, Exploring Text, Audition Techniques (Access to Theatre 2008–9). Others focused on personal development and well-being – Self Development, Women and Anger, Making Choices, Improving your Mental Health (Clean Break, 2011). All of this was underpinned by responsive support staff who attended to the needs of Students and signposted other services beyond the expertise and capacity of the company. Women often came to the programme through a referral with a partner organisation (including women’s centres, probation, hostels), prior contact with the company during a period of incarceration, or word of mouth.

In 2017, primarily due to swathes of funding cuts in local authority arts provision, national and European funding of arts and culture, alongside an increasing organisational focus on the role of Members within the organisation, Clean Break restructured their education and training provision in collaboration with the women who engaged with it. What emerged was a smaller and more theatre-making focused Members’ Programme, committed to collapsing the boundaries between the artistic, education and engagement strands of Clean Break’s work, which has shaped the most recent iteration of the company, with Members ‘at the heart’ of Clean Break. While the education, engagement, and now Members’ Programme have been intrinsic to Clean Break’s work since the early 1990s, a sustained exploration of this provision as a whole has not been undertaken in scholarship about the organisation. Instead, academic work has focused on individual courses within the programme (Reference BartleyBartley, 2019, Reference Bartley, Freebody, Rajendra and Busby2022; Reference Busby and AbrahamBusby and Abraham, 2015; Reference Merrill and FrigonMerrill and Frigon, 2015; Reference AylwynWalsh, 2019). In this section, we review Clean Break’s education and engagement activities as a whole, identifying the personal and political work they do. This strand of Clean Break’s work has been vital for the company’s endurance, both in its political practice and viability as an organisation in the funding landscape of the early noughties. Specifically, we explore how education functions as a practice of endurance across the company’s work.

In engaging with endurance as a central way to understand Clean Break’s education programme, we reject the pervasive neoliberal language of developing individual resilience that has been utilised in policy and government agendas in relation to education and employment since the early 1990s. Endurance, as Julian Reid notes, has a spiritual and historical association with the capacity ‘to bear pain and suffering, as well as have hope’; it is this tension between bearing pain and holding hope that we seek to engage with (Reference Reid, Salazar and ScheerderReid, 2022: 10). However, Reid also asserts that contemporary conceptualisations of endurance address the ways in which education systems ‘train students in the endurance of otherwise intolerable conditions of life’, and that this mode of education must be rejected in order to explore how ‘the conditions of existence can be transformed rather than simply endured’ (Reference Reid, Salazar and ScheerderReid, 2022: 11). In contrast, through engaging with Clean Break’s work, we advocate for understanding the need for education projects that seek to engender transformation to practice and promote endurance as central to resistance.

Our analysis is informed by anthropologist Elizabeth A. Reference PovinelliPovinelli’s (2011) work on endurance under the socially fragmented conditions of late liberalism. This mode of governance foregrounds a recognition of difference and alternative social worlds in order to deflect the critique of anti-neoliberal and anticolonial resistance. Povinelli’s focus is predominantly on indigenous politics and socialites, but we draw on her work to interrogate systems of difference and disenfranchisement bound up in the criminalisation of women. We consider how Clean Break’s education programme endures and trains endurance in order to create a space where women can imagine what Povinelli terms ‘a social otherwise’, an alternative to the existing structure of power and resources. A critical focus on endurance in this context seeks to illuminate the perseverance of trying to maintain the survival of alternative social realities at Clean Break under social conditions that seek to aggregate social worlds and manage resistance.

2.2 Five Decades of Arts and Criminal Justice

As the longest running theatre and criminal justice organisation in the UK, Clean Break have endured an increasingly hostile arts funding landscape and successive waves of punitive justice policies. Here, we reflect on how they have persisted through continuous action. Povinelli utilises the term ‘tense’ to refer to how an event’s temporality is narrated to signify or enact control. In the carceral society that Clean Break intervenes in we understand this tense in relation to both ‘doing time’ while incarcerated and also the ways in which criminalisation has an extended temporality, one which operates beyond a prison sentence and serves to marginalise people with lived experience of incarceration. We are particularly interested in the longevity of the organisation and how this has supported women involved in the education programme to endure the structural violence of the criminal legal system. As Povinelli asserts, ‘Internal to the concept of endurance (and exhaustion) is the problem of substance: its strength, hardiness, callousness; its continuity through space; its ability to suffer and yet persist’ (Reference Povinelli2011: 32). We can point to Clean Break’s hardiness – there have been difficult decisions – and recognise that its continuance over five decades has been a site of struggle, rather than an inevitability in the field of arts and criminal justice. As previous company member and long-time collaborator Paulette Randall identifies:

That Clean Break has continued to exist, while so many of their peer organisations have not, which is remarkable. Randall’s comments are echoed by Clean Break Member Artist Sylvia Amanquah, ‘Honestly, because there is a lot of companies that are no longer here. And I know that Clean Break has gone through a lot. There is times where they’ve really had to kind of fight to keep going’ (Reference Randall2020). In taking up endurance we foreground the work of this continuance. When companies have been around for decades this organisational persistence is, we argue, overlooked or taken for granted; such companies begin to feel like an implicit part of the sector. As Randall and Amanquah both assert, Clean Break changed in order to survive in the shifting landscape of arts practice from the early 1990s. The ability of the company to respond to the changing political, economic and cultural landscape can be traced through the shifts and changes in their education programme and in the material site it operates within.

A central feature of the company’s endurance is its building, a material space in which its education programmes could grow and flourish. As long-term Clean Break collaborator Vishni Velada Billson notes, the education programme

As previously noted, Jenny Hicks was intent on getting the company into a building in order to give it a home (see Section 1.3). In its early days, Clean Break’s work – the planning, fundraising, meetings, workshops, rehearsals and eating together – all took place in the cramped but vibrant offices across the borough of Camden that Hicks had first located. In the late 1980s and early 1990s fundraising began for a dedicated, women-only space. In 1995, with the support of Lottery and Arts Council funding, a derelict building – once a piano factory and a tie factory – off Kentish Town high street was bought. Clean Break’s brief to the architects, Avanti, articulates the vision for the building:

The building is bright and open. It has high ceilings, walls of glass, lots of windows and you can see and hear bodies as they circulate through it, as they pause to have conversations, as they travel up the stairs, across the corridors, in the ‘green room’ and each of the three studios. A kitchen, offices and smaller meeting rooms connect the spaces between the studios. Outside, a garden courtyard. The space – outside and in – is, to quote Avanti, ‘light and set out in an ordered and legible fashion … . Mak[ing] architectural use of those notions which are at the core of the company’s educational philosophy – discovery, security, illumination and transformation’ (ibid).

Figure 4 Clean Break Building at Night, photographer unknown

This articulation of values that underpinned the design of the building set the tone for an approach to being together, to working together, which is not only the antithesis of carceral spaces but a commitment to alternative ways of being and working. This stands in direct contrast to the prison estate as the material fabrication of ideology – ‘a product of power relations, cultural and social dynamics, […] everyday values and meanings’ (Reference HaywardHayward, 2012, 441). Clean Break – the building – is also the material fabrication of ideology where ‘everyday values and meanings’ continue to be meticulously, carefully, collaboratively reflected on and shaped by the company. Crew et al. (2013) drawing on human and carceral geography consider space and place as ‘determinants of social practice and personal experience, rather than an empty theatre or neutral backcloths within and against which they occur’ (60). Interviews with over seventy Members, staff, associate artists, and Board Members (past and present), are exuberant in detailing how their experiences of the building are shaped not only by the architecture, but also by the social practices and relationships created over time within it. As Member artist Peaches Cadogan notes:

In the building, the company has created an alternative space to support endurance. As previous CEO Lucy Perman noted in 2019:

The UK government’s decision to pursue a politics of austerity from 2010 was keenly felt within the criminal justice system and by organisations occupying the arts landscape. Clean Break and the women it works with have endured acutely different economic, social and cultural landscapes. As Labour MP David Lammy asserted, the part-privatisation of the probation service during this period ‘was the deepest privatisation that the criminal justice system has ever experienced, it transferred 70% of the work done by the public probation service to private and voluntary sector providers’ (UK Parliament, 2020). Given the scarcity of support from under-resourced private probation services, Clean Break’s education programme became an even more necessary resource. As Perman’s quote recognises, in this context, to have a building and programme that makes space for women to fight for an alternative, is vital.

2.3 Training Theatre Makers

We argue that Clean Break’s education practices have been fundamental to its survival; both economically (in terms of enabling the company to access to shifting funding streams) and ideologically (in relation to sustaining its commitment to centring women with lived experience of the criminal justice system). The foregrounding of Clean Break’s educational and engagement work during the 1990s and early 2000s, enabled the company to make its mission legible to local government and cultural funders during this period. Throughout the 1980s, Clean Break had undertaken advocacy work and collectively worked on creating and touring productions. The increasing shift to professionalisation at Clean Break in the early 1990s, in the running of the company and the creatives they employed, was a significant driver in the emergence of the training company. As minutes for a 1992 management committee meeting note:

The creation of the training programme, therefore, provided a space for women to develop their artistic practice and enabled the company to fulfil its central commitment to fostering creative opportunities for women with experience of the criminal justice system.

In 1991 and 1992 Clean Break ran ten-week pilots of a performance training programme, funded by the London Arts Board. This was a three-day-a-week programme, supporting Students to develop performance skills and culminating in a collaboratively devised production performed at the Clean Break premises which included The Survivor (1991), and Sexing Venus (1992). Students were given travel and subsistence expenses, as well as access to a crèche during class. One of the early ambitions of this programme was for the company to be ‘able to train its own cast members’ (Clean Break, 1992a: 17). During the early 1990s it became regular company practice to blend Members and professionals, which in some ways is echoed by the model that Clean Break is returning to in the 2020s. Sarah Daniels’ Head-rot Holiday (1992) included one woman who had experience of a secure psychiatric unit, and one who had been on the company’s training programme. The production’s programme noted: ‘Particularly talented participants can join the professional company, becoming a member of the cast or an assistant in the production team. From this they can receive up to three months’ work and an Equity card’ (Clean Break, 1992). A total of five women with lived experience of the justice system received Equity cards from the company during 1991/92. Two women from the training programme became Assistant Stage Managers and one was Assistant Director. Four went on to further work in the theatre, and one started training to work with young people in theatre. The programme itself included poetry written by women who had been or were still held in special hospitals and secure psychiatric units and was illustrated by a woman who had been held in Holloway’s C1 psychiatric wing, whose painting was chosen for the publicity for Head-Rot Holiday. Indeed, some of the women embraced the training programme in particular as an opportunity for artistic development, with one student feeding back ‘Since then I have worked on two short films and a play and earned my Equity card’ and another going on to feature in the company’s 1994 production Red (Training Programme Review, 1995). Others spoke of the course as an opportunity to develop their ability to ‘work in a group and have more patience’ (ibid). These dual outcomes of the very first training programme, artistic upskilling and personal development, would underpin much of the provision on offer at Clean Break for the next twenty-five years.

Figure 5 1992 – Head-Rot Holiday (1992) by Sarah Daniels.

Photograph by Sarah Ainslie

Following this pilot, in 1993 the Home Office provided the company with a funding increase from £15,000 to £42,000. This led to an expansion of the Training Programme to include an Introductory Performance Arts course, a ten-week Training Company Performance Course, and a year-long Further Acting Course (accredited through London Open College Federation). The titles of these courses changed over time and a clear progression route through the programme was developed.Footnote ⁶ The introduction and expansion of these performance courses formed the basis of what became the onsite Education Programme; specifically, the Training Company was the antecedent for two strands of work that became core to Clean Break’s provision: the Access to Higher Education Course (Access) and the Graduate Touring Work.

Between 1993 and 2011, The Access Course offered a Level 3 Qualification – equivalent to 2 A LevelsFootnote ⁷ – accredited by Open College Network. There were twelve places on the course annually and it ran three days a week in line with the academic year. City and Islington College sub-contracted Clean Break to deliver Access as a ‘progression route from its entry level accredited courses’.Footnote ⁸ As former Head of Engagement, Imogen Ashby noted:

In creating a supportive space for women to explore their theatre-making practice and ensuring staff were fully supported in facilitating this process, the company was able to foster a diversification of voices accessing higher education and the theatre sector, cultivating different perspectives on the criminalisation of women.

The work produced by and with Access Students experimented with genre, diverging from the stark realism that characterised much of Clean Break’s Student work. To exemplify: Zawe Ashton’s fantastical She from the Sea (2010) performed by Students on the Access Course follows three women – Pearl, Masha and Edlin – who live together by the sea. The trio remember nothing of their lives before and make the best of their collective solitude and calm retreat, eating what they dredge out of the water – tin cans, newspaper, fish heads. Then Marina washes up in their fishing nets and is pulled ashore, raving about being held below the water for years:

Pearl, Masha and Edlin take this mysterious woman in and she helps them to fish and feed one another, she sings and gradually the others find their voices. This harmony is abruptly shattered when a fisherwoman bursts into their commune seeking revenge on Marina, who claims she killed her child. It emerges that Marina has been in the ocean for five years, punishment for her alleged crime:

Ashton’s use of the sea and the shore in She from the Sea invokes the exhaustion of incarceration, the fight to survive against all the odds, and the potential of a group of women collectively sustaining one another offers a powerful analogy. Being at sea, drowning, tied hands, and making it to the shore all offer a creative language that communicates the effect of being entangled in the justice system and the potential of collective gathering to find an alternative future.

Figure 6 She from the Sea (2010) by Zawe Ashton, Photographer Tracey Anderson

The Access Students performed a range of productions at different sites in London: Five Go to Hollywood (devised by Reference Clarke and WilliamsClean Break Students, 2005) was performed in HMP Holloway; Cakehole (Lucy Reference KirkwoodKirkwood, 2008), an exploration of the social and legal oppression of lesbian and trans identities and the impact of such violence on characters’ lives, was produced at The Hampstead Theatre; and the final production prior to the closure of the Access Course was Cleaning Up (Winsome Reference PinnockPinnock, 2011) staged at the Oval House Theatre and followed three women working as cleaners in an office at the heart of London’s financial district.

During this period, the company also ran First Stage (Reference Owers2006–7), a shorter-lived but similar intervention in the theatre landscape, which was a practical traineeship for Black and Asian women in stage management, sound and lighting and all technical areas of theatre. The course was for anyone working in the industry and had one ring fenced place for a Clean Break student. It ran as a two-week intensive at Clean Break’s base, followed by a traineeship (a supported placement) at London venues, including The Royal Court, The Young Vic and National Youth Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East, and the Tricycle. The traineeships were paid and supported by a personal mentor; the aim was for trainees to gain the necessary skills to secure employment in their area of specialism. Such programmes make interventions that are often imperceptible at a macro scale, but through the endurance of the provision offered by Clean Break the women involved were able to access systems and structures previously inaccessible to them. Until 2017, the company also ran courses in partnership with other higher education providers (London College of Fashion, make-up for theatre course; Rose Bruford College, backstage course; Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Discover Higher Education course and The Summer School). This partnership working also makes a tangible intervention in who those organisations are addressing and how they are developing their own pedagogies.

The other heir to Clean Break’s first Training Programme was the Graduate Touring Work. In 1995, then Education Co-Ordinator, Pauline Gladstone, proposed the introduction of a tour of the students’ work that emerged from the now extensive performance programmes. This proposal was widely supported in the organisation, particularly because it further addressed the lack of representation of women with lived experience in mainstage shows as the company moved through the 1990s. It was thought that this: ‘would resolve problems with professional cast not being ex-offenders and could be achieved with 1/5 of the professional budget reallocated to it. […] The members of that second level Training Company would be in an ideal position to audition for the professional company’ (Clean Break Management Committee minutes, 1 June 1995).

As the minutes evidence, the introduction of the Training Company creating and touring work as part of the yearly programme was initially proposed as an economically efficient way to create opportunities for women with lived experience to develop their theatre-making practice. In this format, the Training Company was envisaged as a way to sustain the flow of women who had been through the criminal legal system into mainstage productions – supporting them to develop their skills and then audition for the ‘Professional Company’ shows.

When Lucy Morrison joined the company as Head of Artistic Programming in 2005, she further embedded the playwrights Clean Break worked with as part of this touring work:

What became known as The Graduate Tour, ran in this format annually from 2008 until 2016, involving graduates of the company’s performance course collaborating with a writer on a short production. Students who had been through the performance programmes would audition to be involved in the production, which would normally consist of a small cast of between three and six women. What became distinctive about Clean Break’s graduate work was the way in which these productions directly sought to stimulate dialogue around the experiences of women caught up in the criminal legal system. The productions were always accompanied by a workshop, which offered space for audiences to work through the material and engage with the complexities of the experiences depicted. Much of this work toured to prisons, universities, government agencies, third sector and charity organisations working in justice, health, education and women’s spaces.

While there were tight parameters around the length and scale of the work, there was significant diversity and depth in the themes and forms that these plays experimented with. Some indicative examples include: Missing Out (Mary Reference CooperCooper, 2008), depicts the experiences of the families of imprisoned women; Sweatbox (Chloe Reference MossMoss, 2015), encloses audiences in a claustrophobic prison van as three women are transported from court to prison; Spent (Katherine Reference ChandlerChandler, 2016), stages three women’s struggle to survive under the UK government’s austerity agenda; and Sonya Hayle’s Hours ’til Midnight (2012), explores addiction from the perspective of two sisters and was the first graduate commission written by a Member Artist. Across these works, playwrights draw on different formal strategies to interrogate the realities of criminalisation that they address. For example, Vivienne Franzmann’s Sounds Like an Insult (2015), uses a series of short snapshots, some direct address, and other vignettes of dialogue to explore the experiences of women with complex mental health needs within the criminal legal system:

This is the first scene of the play and is representative of the brief insight audiences are given into a character’s experience before attention shifts to a different situation in a new scene. These brief encounters include scenes of staccato dialogue (as already mentioned), alongside short monologues voicing different characters’ experiences. As Franzmann reflected:

The collage form of the play reflected the diversity of experience in the system and, further, in its fast-moving and constantly changing style created the effect of being in a constantly moving landscape that was difficult to gain a foothold in – a failing system in disarray.

Both Sounds Like an Insult and She from the Sea depict women enduring the system and are indicative of ways in which Clean Break’s Student productions sought to create performances that would enable audiences accessible ways into complex conversations about incarceration and criminalisation. This work was the beginning of intentional and structural blurring of the boundaries between education and professional strands of practice with the students performing this work in a range of professional contexts, both in theatres and festivals (LIFT, Oval House, Soho Theatre and Latitude Festival) and criminal justice, health and third-sector organisations.

2.4 Everydayness and the Work of the Education Programme

Prior to the merging of the artistic and educational strands of Clean Break’s work in 2017, there was a persistent tension and a perceived hierarchy of resource and attention embedded in the artistic work (AKA the ‘professional’ productions that were often co-produced with major UK theatres) and the education, outreach and graduate practice of the organisation. Here we turn to Povinelli’s conceptualisation of ‘eventfulness’, which connotes an interest in both amplified encounters with crisis or catastrophe but also, and more commonly, those events that are not deemed significant enough to be termed eventful. It is these ‘quasi-events’ that Povinelli is keen to attend to, the ‘ordinary, chronic, and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime’, in order to advocate that we reorient who is perceived as in need of support and how we respond (Reference Povinelli2011: 13). Here she is talking about the everydayness of marginalised people’s increased exposure to harm. We deploy Povinelli’s dichotomy of the event (as catastrophic rupture) and the quasi-event (as small breakages and struggles assigned as ordinary); casting the mainstage productions as dealing with the frame of ‘the event’ and the education work as navigating the quasi-events encountered by women in the criminal justice system. In drawing on the ‘quasi-event’, we argue that the education work at Clean Break over thirty years persistently and doggedly addressed the everyday and the chronic experiences of those encountering the carceral system. Unlike the plays, that implicitly centre a particular crisis event to be witnessed by an audience, the education work attended to the ongoing and unrecognised violence that women with lived experience encountered.

In this context of recognising the violence encountered by the women they work with, Clean Break centres trauma-informed practice in their work. The company draws on Stephanie Covington’s work in this area, which encourages organisations to:

Beyond ensuring staff are trained in trauma-informed practice, Clean Break accounts for the potential experiences of trauma within their Membership by fostering supportive spaces for the women to make work. Members attending Clean Break are cared for by the Members’ Support Team who work with the women to support them through emotional, logistical or financial difficulties that might arise during their engagement with the company. This support might consist of counselling, advice around housing or employment, and signposting to wider services. Clean Break therefore embed their trauma-informed approach both within workshop practice and in the wider fabric of the organisation, as Ashby notes: ‘all of our work was trauma informed, because it was all about recognising where somebody was meeting you in their relational engagement and seeing what you could do with that’ (Reference Ashby and FranzmannAshby and Franzmann, 2020). In having a trauma-informed practice, Clean Break is making space to make present and legible the unperceived quasi-events that erode access to imagining other lives or accessing a position of agency.

In 2000, the Self Development Programme was created by Clean Break education staff member, Fay Barratt, and self-development facilitator Jackee Holder, for women not ready to move on to theatre courses provided by Clean Break but keen to engage with the company and access support around health, well-being, interpersonal skills and personal growth. The programme grew under the stewardship of Anna Herrmann (Head of Education, 2002–18) and Imogen Ashby (Education Manager 2002–10; and Head of Engagement 2011–16). This expansion of provision, moving beyond performance practice, asserted the role of Clean Break as a leading provider in London for women with convictions. A complementary strand to the company’s Self Development Programme was the Women and Anger Course, which was a structured group-work programme written by a psychotherapist and comprised of fifteen sessions delivered over six weeks. It was created ‘for women who find it difficult to express their anger in a way which is not harmful to themselves or to others’, and women completed a pre-assessment with the Student Support team in order to gauge their suitability for the programme (Clean Break, 2015). Women and Anger was founded in Social Learning theory and employed Cognitive Behavioural methods to address the relatively under explored area of women’s feelings of anger through facilitated group sessions (Reference Clarke and WilliamsClarke and Williams, 2005). The course aimed to provide ‘a non-judgmental space for you to understand your anger, manage your emotions better and to practise new coping strategies through drama techniques and creative practice’ (Clean Break, 2015). While the company had experience of creating well-being and personal development courses, Women and Anger was distinctive in that it was the company’s first structured group-work programme to address emotional and behavioural factors. The programme was delivered to ten women in each cycle with facilitators guided by a manual, specialist training, and supervision. The Women and Anger course ran until the closure of the education programme creating a space for women to come together collectively and creatively to work through experiences of anger and develop coping strategies for triggering situations. As one participant fed back at the end of the course:

Women and Anger is indicative of the suite of well-being and personal development programmes that Clean Break offered during this period, which sought to equip women with tools to navigate the various ‘quasi-events’ they might encounter and which might lead them into further contact with the criminal legal system.

These examples of Clean Break’s direct development programmes are closely allied to their other engagement work, much of which is offered with women held in prison settings and is structured around the playwriting residencies that Clean Break have developed. Playwrights are resident with the company for around eighteen months, occasionally longer, during which time they do a series of projects at different prisons and also access creative support for writers by building relationships with commissioning theatres. Again, this process was formalised by Lucy Morrison when she joined the company. During this residency playwrights draw on their collaborations with Members and women they work with in prison to write a commission for the company, either a shorter touring piece (around thirty minutes) to be performed by Clean Break Members in different professional settings (probation services, prisons, universities) or the company might collaborate with a larger producing theatre towards a full-length production. Often resident playwrights do both. The majority of the work in prison settings then is focused on playwriting and performance sharings among the incarcerated women. The residencies predominantly occur in a three-day block, with Clean Break artists working with a group of women facilitating exercises on theatre writing and supporting them to create their own work. At the end of the project, actors come in and perform the women’s work back to them or they can perform it alongside the actors if they want to. There is a focus on creating an opportunity for women to see their own work performed. As Anna Herrmann notes ‘within those three days it’s very possible to create a different culture within the prison for them, and that’s a really powerful starting point’ (Herrmann quoted in Reference Drinkwater and DaveyDrinkwater and Davey, 2017: 4). Through this small intervention then, there can be the beginnings of a shift in the experience of what can happen in a prison site. Reflecting on the impact of this work in prisons, Morrison noted:

There was an ‘everydayness’ in the work that the company did in different prison settings, ‘small offerings’ in contained projects that made minor interventions in bringing performance into carceral spaces. However, in doing this work consistently and taking theatre into these ‘barren’ sites, the work enabled a kind of experience of endurance for those participating.

In her analysis of endurance as a practice of performance art, Lara Shalson notes that ‘[e]ndurance is thus a wilful act, but a wilful act that confronts in repeated and sustained encounters the limits of individual agency’ (Reference Shalson2018: 13). There is a wilfulness to Clean Break’s education and engagement programmes, which support women to confront their encounters with, in this instance quite literally, their limited agency. While the work of the mainstage productions was significant in advocating for criminalised women, depicting crises that they might encounter and trying to expand wider understandings of these contexts, the ongoing and persistent work of the education programme at Clean Break supported women to navigate the imperceptible quasi-events that further marginalise and oppress them. In addressing the quasi-event through their education programme, Clean Break dealt with ‘how the very nature of the quasi-event makes it an effective means for shifting accountability away from neoliberalism onto those who suffer in neoliberalism’ (Reference PovinelliPovinelli, 2011: 154). In brief, the education and engagement work supported women to navigate and name the oppressive structures they encountered.

2.5 ‘The Women’: From Company, to Students, to Members

When in conversation with anyone involved in the work of Clean Break they often refer to ‘the women’, to reference the women whom the organisation seeks to serve, stand alongside and advocate for through performance. An exploration of the education and outreach strand of Clean Break’s work is significant as it offers an opportunity to reflect on the position of women with lived experience of the criminal justice system over the company’s history and to consider what this means for the company’s practice and wider understandings of socially and politically committed theatre making. In what has preceded, we have traced the shift of women with lived experience from founders to company members, to students, to graduates. Read alongside Povinelli’s framing of endurance, which asks us to critique who is empowered to assert the structures through which we construct our morality and ethics, a consideration of how women with lived experience are positioned at Clean Break invites a reflection on who gets to shape how the organisation presents criminalised women.

In 2017, the education programme (as outlined earlier) ceased. What has emerged subsequently is a reimagining of the company and its relationship with women with lived experience of the criminal justice system. In the press release stating this shift in Clean Break’s work, they announced a new mission: ‘Producing ground-breaking theatre which puts women’s voices at its heart and creates lasting change by challenging injustice in and beyond the criminal justice system’ (Herrmann in Clean Break, 2018). This intention to centre women’s voices was to be realised by a new model of practice, central to which was a Members’ programme: ‘In the new model, Members (previously students and graduates) will join the company, engage in high quality training and workshops and participate in Clean Break’s creative life. The Members will be at the heart of our theatre output and vision for: A society where women can realise their full potential, free from criminalisation’ (Herrmann in Clean Break, 2018).

In 2019, the company produced Inside Bitch, conceived by Stacey Gregg and Deborah Pearson, and devised and performed by Clean Break Members Lucy Edkins, Jennifer Joseph, TerriAnn Oudjar and Jade Small. It was a powerful first public manifestation of this reimagined mission. Co-produced with The Royal Court, Inside Bitch was the realisation of the mission to put Members centre stage, marking a notable development of the practice of the Graduate Touring work discussed earlier, with Edkins, Joseph, Oudjar and Small all contributing to the development of the performance, which reached mainstage audiences over its month-long run (see also Section 3). Subsequently, Clean Break has produced mixed-cast productions, with several Members appearing in [Blank] (at The Donmar Warehouse, 2019), Typical Girls (at The Crucible Theatre, 2021), and Dixon and Daughters (The National Theatre of Great Britain, 2023) working alongside actors without lived experience of the criminal justice system.

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Clean Break produced 2 Metres Apart, a project that paired 12 artists with 12 Clean Break Member Artists to undertake eight weeks of creative collaboration. This signified the increasing commitment to co-creation at the company and the continuing erosion of boundaries that had previously existed between professional artists and women with lived experience within the company’s work. The work 2 Metres Apart itself was not focused on a commissioning process or geared towards producing work, but instead sought to offer opportunities for creative collaborations to emerge during a period of social isolation. Anna Herrmann has described the project as ‘the clearest example of a project in which we were looking to further our investment in collaboration, which is in a way a follow up to Inside Bitch’ (Herrmann qtd in Bartley, 2021: 84). The increasing diversification of the ways in which work is created, produced and shared with audiences by Clean Break has been rooted in the company’s commitment to finding new models of co-operation and collaboration that reassert the value of different forms of knowledge and across different experiences. This echoes an increasing turn to the reassertion of the value of lived experience and the appeal of co-creation in the current arts landscape. This refocusing of Clean Break’s work prioritises the knowledge of those who have been through the system, increasingly positioning the women as authors and performers of their own experience and, in Povinelli’s framework, as central to narrativising the ways in which women are criminalised.

It is important to note that while this recentring of women with lived experience in the artistic work of the company is a shift in the way it organises its creative practice, the women have been central to the ethical work of the organisation throughout their history. An example of Clean Break’s commitment to centring the voices and experiences of women with lived experience was Breaking In (1999–2001). This was a two-year training project that worked with Members to develop their skills as community-theatre facilitators. The programme specifically aimed to train Members to work with young people deemed ‘at risk’ of offending and more broadly with other marginalised communities, which had an increased likelihood of coming into contact with the criminal justice system. The project included onsite training at Clean Break and also traineeships working in different community organisations and prisons. There were eleven trainees who completed the course, with several completing portfolios for a Level 3 NVQ in Delivering Art Form Development Sessions. As is stated on Clean Break’s digital archive website: ‘[t]he project was unique in its aspiration to ensure that theatre practice in criminal justice settings was led by those with experience of the system themselves’ (Clean Break, ‘Short Courses and Progression Routes’, n.d.). This work, coinciding with a period of increased professionalisation in community arts practice, offered training to enable Members to be positioned as practitioners in arts and criminal justice projects rather than just participants. Such a move is significant in terms of disrupting who gets to design, create and lead work in arts and criminal justice contexts.

Clean Break is a company that persistently addresses and intervenes in systems of power in the work it produces. Members increasingly have a structural say in the decision-making process by which writers are commissioned and are more regularly appearing and/or contributing to the creation of the main stage work. However, there is a need for checking the optimism which such transformative modes of creation seem to offer. In 2022 Clean Break ran four courses: Health and Wellbeing, Creative Space, Theatre Makers, and Writers Room at their site in Kentish Town. Therefore, in practice Clean Break now run a significantly reduced provision for women, with fewer courses that focus predominantly on theatre-making provision for women with lived experience. The removal of funds for this work attests to the erosion of the culture sector. More broadly there is a continued lack of local authority funding for cultural provision following over a decade of austerity policies, the COVID-19 pandemic, the energy crisis, and inflationary pressures and insufficient economic support from the UK government leading to a cost-of-living crisis, which has put acute pressures on public services. Finally, the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union has had significant impacts on those organisations previously in receipt of EU funding.

Current Artistic Director, Anna Herrmann, reaffirms Clean Break’s ongoing commitment to endurance: ‘We must continue to be there for generations to come, to celebrate more successes and to make sure that the door continues to stay open’ (Reference Herrmann, Prentki and PrestonHerrmann, 2013: 335). Indeed, as we have observed, one of the most significant things about Clean Break is its longevity over the course of forty plus years. The restructuring of the company as Member-focused is a manifestation of the ways in which the company transforms to persist; hopefully this will enable it to continue to deliver provision for women with lived experience for decades to come. As former CEO Lucy Perman said when reflecting on her own role as a leader at the company,

In this section, we have explored endurance through three frames: (1) the longevity of the company as temporal endurance; (2) the focus of the training company on sustaining opportunities for women with lived experience and the ways in which the wider education programme addressed everyday ‘ordinary’ violences; and (3) what shifts in the location of women with experience reveal about how the company contests who gets to formulate ethical and moral codes under the logic of late liberalism. By foregrounding endurance, we have sought to recognise the ways the company, and the women it works with, navigate the different uncertainties that surround cultural institutions and carceral contexts in ways that enable it to survive in an increasingly hostile landscape. This offers a way to understand how the persistence of the company as a whole, and its education programme in particular, intervenes in the ways in which the temporalities, systems of categorising an event’s significance, and the moral structures of our society further disenfranchise marginalised communities. In sum, an organisation such as Clean Break tries to create social alternatives through which we can collaboratively imagine new moral realities.

3.1 Presumption … and Other Narrative Possibilities

In order to analyse how Clean Break does this, we need to take a step back to think about how information is constructed and circulated: What do we know about criminalised women? How does this knowledge get made and circulated? Why does it matter?

In the introduction to Criminal Women (Reference Carlen1985), Carlen writes,

And, we would argue, a general public. Carlen’s comments, written nearly four decades ago, continue to be pertinent and, as Inside Bitch so persuasively reminds us, these assumptions, myths, and stereotypes about criminalised women continue to infiltrate the popular imagination through news, documentaries, word of mouth and, particularly, cultural representations in film and TV. The power of cultural representation as a system of knowledge transmission about crime, criminals and punishment is recognised by cultural criminologists, and explicitly by popular criminologists, Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown when they write, ‘criminology is hard at work in culture and that culture is hard at work in criminology’ (Reference Rafter and Brown2011: 1).

There is a growing body of academic work in popular criminology considering film, television, and literature, particularly novels (Reference Bailey and HaleBailey and Hale, 1997; Reference Rafter and BrownRafter and Brown, 2011) but there is limited consideration, to date, of theatre and performances’ contribution to criminological discourse and knowledge creation. Whilst films, television and literature operate within an economy of circulation that allows for limitless audiences and the infinite circulation of ideas, narratives and images through repeat viewing and reading, the ontology of theatre and performance necessitates a time-limited, live interaction with specific audiences. But although theatre operates with different modes and economies of audience, it is important not to dismiss or underestimate its power in developing new epistemological understandings. Performance scholar Aylwyn Walsh, drawing cultural criminology to bear on theatre studies, asserts ‘the importance of performance in constituting the carceral imaginary. Its significance is its concern with the body in relation to spectatorship and meaning making as valuable when understood against and through how crime and punishment are scripted, enacted and received’ (Reference Aylwyn2019: 5).

In this section, we consider some of the ways that Clean Break’s attention to women’s experiences of criminalisation develops new understandings about prison as a fabrication of social control and power relations in carceral society. Our analysis is built upon two key ideas about the creation and circulation of knowledge: social epistemology and epistemic injustice.

3.2 Not Presuming to Always Already Know

Social epistemology is ‘the interdisciplinary inquiry into the myriad ways humans socially acquire, create, construct, transmit, store, represent, revise, and review knowledge, information, belief and judgement’ (Reference Miranda, Graham, Henderson and HendersonFricker et al., 2019: xvii). In short, how do humans know things? Goldman proposes that knowledge is held and circulated in three main ways: how individuals acquire knowledge from others (interpersonal social epistemology); how groups may acquire knowledge (collective social epistemology) and how institutions acquire knowledge (institutional social epistemology) (Reference Miranda, Graham, Henderson and Henderson2019: 10–20). Fricker et al. qualify this when they make explicit that ‘institutions […] themselves may not have beliefs, but are made of individuals or groups that do, [which] influence the creation and transmission of knowledge’ (Reference Miranda, Graham, Henderson and Henderson2019: xvii).

Since its inception, Clean Break has been concerned with the kinds of knowledge about women’s experiences in circulation with individuals, groups, and institutions – particularly those within the criminal justice system. Theatre, with audiences of individuals gathered together as a group, offers opportunities for the development of interpersonal and collective social epistemology. The company’s commitment to enhancing institutional social epistemology through touring work to prisons and training events for magistrates, police, probation services and policy makers has been evident from the very beginning: in 1979, when performing in Edinburgh for the first time, the company were invited to HMP Barlinnie, Glasgow, where they performed in the Special Unit, a small therapeutic community for violent men. Holborough’s letter to Susan McCormick gives an insight into the impact of this for both the company and the audience:

The following year, Clean Break’s tour schedule for In or Out (Hicks and Mottley) and Killers (Holborough) details performances in theatres, colleges, health settings (London Hospital and Maudsley Hospital, London) as well as criminal justice settings including a return to Edinburgh Festival and Barlinnie’s Special Unit; Pucklechurch Remand Centre, Bristol; Inner London Probation Service; and a Prison Psychologists Conference.

Since the 1980s, the criminologist Pat Carlen has significantly influenced thinking about formal and informal social control on women’s experiences, particularly criminalisation and incarceration. Carlen listened to incarcerated women, recognising their expertise in their own lives, articulating how the ‘processes and practices of social control and regulation shape the lives, subjectivities and worlds of the powerless […] and to what effect’ (Reference PhoenixPhoenix, 2012: 258). She was a major influence on Clean Break’s thinking about the personal and political implications of criminalisation and incarceration in a capitalist social order. The book Criminal Women (Reference Carlen1985), edited by Carlen, focused on the narratives of four women who had been sentenced for criminal offences. Three of them – Jenny Hicks, Josie O’Dwyer and Chris Tchaikovsky – were Members of Clean Break in the early and mid-1980s and Carlen collaborated with Chris Tchaikovsky to establish, in 1983, the campaigning organisation Women in Prison, which continues today. One of the most important ideas in thinking about the ways in which Clean Break’s theatre practices can expand the epistemological landscape, is Carlen’s concept of the ‘criminological imagination’. This is an acknowledgement of the duality of the processes and practices of social control alongside the possibility that ‘the ordering of things can always be otherwise’ (2012: 345). For Carlen, Clean Break and Women in Prison, the duality of how things are and the criminological imagination in envisioning that ‘the ordering of things can always be otherwise’ is an activist imperative, fundamental to any kind of personal, social and political change. For Clean Break, theatre was a collaborative, creative and critical act of imagination with other women who had personal experience of prison and with audiences who had none.

Figure 8 Jenny Hicks and Eva Mottley In or Out (Reference Holborough, Needs and Tilley1981) by Jenny Hicks, Oval House Theatre

Figure 9 Jacki Holborough and Cat Coull Killers (1981) by Jacki Holborough, Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Carlen’s caution, ‘while prisons do exist we must never presume that we always already know what goes on behind the walls’ (Reference CarlenCarlen, 1983: 218), is pertinent to thinking about women’s experiences of incarceration: while women in prisons do exist we must never presume that we always already know who they are or what their experiences are behind the walls. Clean Break’s creation of over 100 plays, informed by women’s often hidden or unacknowledged experiences, is an extraordinary epistemological resource that directly intervenes in epistemic injustice (Reference FrickerFricker, 2010).

3.3 Testimonial Injustice

Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice (Reference Fricker2010, Reference Fricker, Rik and Martijn2016) offers productive ways for us to analyse Clean Break’s work as social epistemological practices through three lenses: ‘testimonial injustice’, hermeneutical injustice and ‘the preservation of ignorance’. Fricker argues that ‘testimonial injustice’ happens when someone is not believed because of assumptions and prejudice about who they are: ‘An example […] might be that the police do not believe you because you are black’ (Reference Fricker2010: 1). Testimonial injustice occurs when ‘the level of credibility attributed to a speaker’s word is reduced by prejudice operative in the hearer’s judgement’ (Reference Fricker, Rik and Martijn2016: 161). Feminist criminologists, penal historians and reformers have evidenced how, time and again, the testimony of women in police custody, courts of law and the court of public opinion is belittled and dismissed because of assumptions and prejudice about women generally and specifically women who have been accused of committing a crime who, as sociological data continues to evidence, have life experiences shaped by societal disadvantage in relation to race, class, health, education and poverty (Reference AgozinoAgozino, 1997; Reference KennedyKennedy, 1993, Reference Kennedy2018; Reference McCorkelMcCorkel, 2013). In these contexts, criminalised women’s capacity as ‘knowers’ is undermined or derided because of prejudice.

Clean Break directly addressed and redressed this testimonial injustice. From its inception, the company boldly declared and aligned the company’s identity as its authority to speak about women’s experience of criminalisation through personal experience: ‘Clean Break Women’s Theatre Group’ (Reference Hicks and HolboroughHicks and Holborough, 1979), ‘Clean Break Women Prisoners Theatre’ (Clean Break, 1979) and ‘Clean Break Theatre Group (Women Prisoners)’ and a ‘successful theatre group made up of women ex-prisoners’ (Clean Break, 1982).

These referents are defiant declarations of expertise without a whisper of apology, shame or stigma – no matter what wider society may assume to know, think or judge about women, women prisoners and women ex-prisoners. Or, for that matter, women who make theatre.

All of the work created during the first decade of the company’s life was written, devised and performed by women with experience of the criminal justice system. Some of the earlier plays, particularly Killers (1980) and Decade (1984), are explicit about the material conditions of women’s incarceration and the wider social apathy and political neglect that shapes this. Both Killers (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1980) and Decade (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1984) were located in H-wing, a maximum-security unit which held women within HMP Durham. This notorious unit, called E-Wing, was originally built for twenty-five men, convicted of acts of violence, who posed a serious threat to society. The conditions were inhumane and, after hunger strikes and riots by the men which drew enough public concern to warrant political action, the prison was closed in 1971. Four years later it was reopened as women’s unit. Of the thirty-five women held in the renamed H-Wing, three were Category A prisoners, convicted of acts of terrorism and murder. The other thirty-two women were given short sentences for non-violent crimes such as theft and fraud – they were the ‘day trippers’ (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1984: 11). Killers explicitly and succinctly summarises the shifts in prison practices: ‘When the men were here there were protests. Demonstrations every day’.

The phrases ‘hardly been known to exist’ and ‘they’ll fade from view’ are indicative of the social and political neglect of incarcerated women prevalent in the late 1970s and, as Clean Break’s work continues to illustrate, endures. In Decade, the character of Jane – an incarcerated women in a high security prison – crystallises the differentiated view of the representation of men and women in news and public discourse, ‘Christ, men go on hunger strike or in solitary, women diet and stay in their rooms’ (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1984: 34). She also recounts how this is symptomatic of a system which has historically gendered the criminological subject as male: If I were a man there’d be a dozen dispersal units to shunt me around but as a woman I’m just a token. A freak. Caged up in this tiny space in the middle of a man’s prison because I’m all there is’ (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1984: 13). ‘The whole thing is designed to keep us gagged and in our place. […] We’re only women. We don’t riot because then they’d set the men on us – and the dogs. […] I could start a revolution in the bog but mention solidarity and the subject is changed to parole dates. They’ve got too much to lose’ (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1984: 11).

‘H’ wing was a single unit for women within a larger male prison complex – ‘a tomb’, ‘a concrete submarine’, ‘a prison within a prison: buried in the middle of larger building housing 1000 men’ (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1980d: 1). All of the women in ‘H’ wing were subject to the maximum-security prison conditions, where cell doors were secured with, ‘Not one, not two but three sets of bars at my bullet-proof window. Looking onto the fences, the wall, the camera, the scanner lights, barbed wire, dogs’ (Reference HolboroughHolborough, 1980d: 15). At the time, there were local campaigns (led by Women in Durham Prison Support Group) and a national campaign (led by Women in Prison) to bring attention to the oppressive ‘living conditions and measures imposed in the name of security’ which prompted the Howard League for Penal Reform to recommend its closure (1979). Both Killers and Decade contributed to this campaign of public understanding through fictional narratives, based on women’s life experiences, alongside articles such as, ‘Like Living in a Submarine’, that appeared in the Radical Alternatives to Prison magazine, The Abolitionist (Reference Hicks and BoyleHicks and Boyle, 1983: 3). Through performance and alternative publications, women’s experiences in Durham H Wing therefore circulated more widely than before.

Figure 10 Killers (1980), Pleasance Theatre Programme, Edinburgh Fringe

Fricker states that ‘An epistemic system characterised by testimonial injustice is a system in which ignorance will repeatedly prevail over potentially shared knowledge, despite speakers’ best efforts’ (Reference Fricker, Rik and Martijn2016: 162). As the following reviews show, Clean Break’s theatre practice directly intervened in the epistemic system as an act of redress. Their authority and credibility are recognised and valued:

3.4 Hermeneutical injustice

Hermeneutical injustice occurs, Fricker argues, when society does not know about, recognise, or have the vocabulary to talk about something. She calls this ‘a gap in collective interpretative resources’ that ‘puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences; […] an example […] might be that you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks that critical concept’ (Reference Fricker2010: 1). Fricker makes the link between those who may experience testimonial injustice (diminished credibility as a knower because of prejudice, e.g. criminalised women) and with hermeneutical injustice (e.g. the experiences of criminalised women):

If representations of women in prison are limited and lacking in the nuance which reflects lived experience, the gap in society’s collective interpretative resources continues to perpetuate a hermeneutical injustice not just against them, but also their families, the organisations, and networks which seek to support them and, ultimately, society. It reinscribes and reiterates the violence of structural disadvantage and social control.

Clean Break not only highlights women’s experience within prison but carefully attends to the circumstances of their lives before and the implications for their lives after. The press materials for a tour of Avenues in Merseyside (1981) explain that it is a play about three women, written by members of the cast and ‘based on real experiences’:

Avenues offers a simple, structural premise, however reviewers at the time articulate how the play’s nuanced understandings about women’s experiences within the criminal justice system provide, in Fricker’s words, interpretative resources to talk about these experiences:

We have quoted from the reviews at length because they evidence the ways in which Clean Break engages with the possibilities of theatre making to do something other than report, document or didactically denounce. Instead, Clean Break creates spaces for the audiences to think rather than be told, ‘to make their own connections’, to ‘draw their own conclusions’. This creation of narrative and representational frameworks offers shared points of reference for critical engagement and, as accounts of the after-show discussions evidence, invigorated discussion. Jacki Holborough’s letter to Susan McCormick offers a textured sense of this engagement and questioning:

In 1989, there was a seismic change in the way that Clean Break developed new plays. As the organisation moved from a collective to a more traditional model of hierarchical theatre management with funding and business plans, Clean Break employed women who were sympathetic to the mission of the company rather than women who had personal experience of incarceration. There was a fundamental shift away from the representation of women with lived experience in the decision-making processes of the company and in the theatre work produced. Until this point, the creation of plays by women who had experience of prison was prioritised – their experience, authenticity and authority were integral to the identity of the company. The production of Bryony Lavery’s Wicked (1990) was the first in a new phase of the company’s commissioning practices, where professional writers wrote plays informed by their research about women’s experience of the criminal justice system. Whilst this decision prompted ongoing debate and reflection within the organisation for the next three decades, it meant that the company produced work that represented a wider terrain of women’s experiences – both in terms of what those experiences were and the range of theatre forms employed to engage audiences.

The company’s relentless commitment to expose the hidden narratives beyond the stereotypes of women and crime, details an expansive and interconnected range of social injustices including: racism (24%, 1991, Paulette Randall); mental illness (Sounds Like an Insult, 2014, Vivienne Franzmann); enduring poverty and social immobility (Spent, 2016, Katherine Chandler); addiction (Pests 2014, Vivienne Franzmann); family rupture (Apatche Tears, 2000, Lin Coghlan; Billy the Girl, Reference Hims2013, Katy Hims); the impact of faith in relation to intergenerational shame (House, Reference Seaton2016, Somalia Seaton; Favour, Reference Razia2022, Ambreen Razia); the particularity of friendships forged between women when serving sentences together (Little on the Inside, Reference Birch2013, Alice Birch; This Wide Night, Reference Moss2008, Chloë Moss); and sex trafficking and illegal immigration (it felt empty when the heart left but it’s alright now, Reference Kirkwood2009, Lucy Kirkwood). This brief selection of plays illustrates some of the ways that Clean Break has invited publics to attend to the experience of women whose lives are often masked by stereotype and lazy cultural representation. They detail hidden backstories that shape individual women’s experiences, reminding audiences, echoing Carlen, to not presume to always already know the detail of someone’s life. They address hermeneutic injustices by providing collective interpretative resources for society to see, understand and respond to.

Figure 11 WICKED Wicked (1990) by Bryony Lavery, Oval Theatre.

Photographer Sarah Ainslie

3.5 Narrative Discomfort, ‘the preservation of ignorance’, and [BLANK]

The company dared to speak out about their experiences as women at a particular historical moment and detail through a growing catalogue of plays, the influence of informal social control (patriarchal values which position women in the domestic, feminine sphere as normal and anything other as deviant) and formal social control (the ways in which the criminal justice system neglects the specific needs of women within its care, layering additional punishment on the sanctioned removal of liberty). It would be easier and understandable if the anger and pain of this experience led women to a place of blame and condemnation, of further social segregation as an act of self-protection. However, Clean Break, acknowledging social fear and political apathy, stepped towards others, offering their experience as a bridge to new knowledge and understanding about the current state of play and the knowledge that things could be different. This duality is what Carlen refers to as the ‘criminological imagination’. Imagination is the key word here; to imagine is a creative act, it is to create an expanded sense of possibilities, of ways of being. But this takes collaboration – between Clean Break as theatre makers and audiences as collaborators. And this is where Miranda Fricker’s and Gaile Pohlhaus Jnr’s work on the preservation of ignorance is pertinent. Wilful ignorance

Since the 1970s, there have been a number of damning reports about the conditions of women’s imprisonment in the UK (Reference CorstonCorston, 2007; Owers, 2005; Reference RamsbothamRamsbotham, 1997). At the point of each publication there is outrage, followed by the declaration of political promises which, after a period of time in which next to nothing happens, the mumbling of political excuses follows. When the male prisoners at HMP Durham’s E wing protested conditions, the unit closed within a few years. When the women in the renamed H Wing protested and prison ombudsman reports condemned it as oppressive and not fit for habitation, it took 30 years before the unit was closed. In 2006, the deaths of six women over thirteen months in HMP Styal was the tragic catalyst for a government review of the treatment of vulnerable women in the criminal justice system. This was led by Jean Corston and in her report (Reference Corston2007), she contextualised the ongoing, wilful neglect:

Corston’s report detailed forty-three explicit recommendations to address failures and gaps in the system. When it was published, it was welcomed as both an exposition of successive governments’ scandalous neglect and a blueprint for structural change. More than a decade later, community-based initiatives to support vulnerable women that were outlined in Corston’s report have been decimated by government cuts undertaken in the name of austerity. In 2017, to mark a decade since the publication of the report with a clear and feasible action plan, Women in Prison, the charity established by Carlen and Tchaikovsky, detailed the minimal amount of action taken. This lack of action and ‘preservation of ignorance’ is motivated or ‘wilful’ (Reference PohlhausPohlhaus, 2012).

To consider how Clean Break has explicitly noted the implications of such ignorance, we conclude Section 3 with analysis of Alice Birch’s [BLANK]. As we shall demonstrate, the play, through form, content, and curation of scenes from the text, makes an important contribution to understandings about criminalised women and the long shadows of stigma and shame that haunt and shape their lives. [BLANK] is a prompt to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ – to engage with the lives and voices of women too often banished behind the material bricks and mortar of prison walls and the ethereal but all too concrete cultural representations of stereotype, that fix social understandings about women, crime, and punishment.

[BLANK], was co-commissioned by Clean Break and the Donmar Warehouse as part of Clean Break’s fortieth anniversary celebrations. Within the Clean Break repertoire, the play had an usually large cast of potentially fourteen children, young people and adults. It also offered a distinctive form – 100 possible scenes – to engage both theatre makers and audiences in the politics of witnessing representations of criminalised women on stage and the consequences of this off stage. Birch offers some rules to guide a theatre company navigating this text:

With the Donmar production, Maria Aberg, the director, led the selection of twenty-two of the scenes. The characters are identified as A, B, C etc. Some scenes feature one character, some two or three, and Scene 100, an epic dinner party scene features fourteen characters. The people we meet in one scene, may or may not appear in another.

Figure 12 Rehearsal of [BLANK] (2019) by Alice Birch, Donmar Warehouse.

Photographer: Helen Maybanks

If you read the text in its entirety, you get snapshots of lives, already ruptured by events that have happened off stage, some potentially years ago, some recently. A child on the phone to its mother, anxious that it took seven rings for her to pick up, keen to know if she’s taken her medication, if she’s paid the bills, who she’s with, to tell them she loves them – again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again (Scene 7 – Seven). A mother who catches her daughter breaking into the family home in the middle of the night to find money or goods to sell to pay for drugs; who refuses to ‘help’ her daughter by giving her money, whose daughter says that if she doesn’t, she’ll have to go and get money another way – prostitution (Scene 54 – Cry). A mother, potentially, the same one, in conversation with a young, nervous police officer who has come to tell her that her daughter has been found dead (Scene 66 – Transference). A mother making ‘posh’ pizza for her daughter who is concerned that, for her mother, getting her head stamped in, is all in a day’s work when dealing with perpetrators of domestic violence (Scene 8 – Pizza). A child who has recently arrived in a care home, opens a letter from their mother who is in prison, and finds a mix tape she has made. This is calmly and slowly unspooled by another child as part of an extraordinarily short, slow but vicious exposition of their power (Scene 4 – Tape). Of a group of children, who have created t-shirts and a Facebook page as part of a search party to look for someone’s mum – who has gone missing eight times before (Scene 5 – T-Shirts). A pregnant woman in a prison cell who has just been told that she’s been accepted into a mother and baby unit – who is torn between accepting this or turning it down because the unit is even further away from her children than the prison, who worries that:

[BLANK]’s patchwork of characters and narratives offers an extraordinary range of representations of lives shaped by societal structures of disadvantage which are in one way or another in contact with the criminal justice system. In a context where women with experience of the criminal justice system are too often dismissed as unreliable or untrustworthy, [BLANK] invites us to consider who and what is made visible and who and what is invisible; to examine the stories we choose to engage with, the voices we choose to listen to. Whilst fictional accounts about women affected by the criminal justice system in popular television series or films may have a clear beginning, middle and end, the reality is very different, refusing to be contained within a single, neat narrative frame. [BLANK] – Alice Birch’s invitation to choose from 100 possible scenes, to play with their order and staging – is a call to considered action. But the choice to take action – to see, to hear, to witness, to intervene in narratives about women’s criminalisation which reiterate epistemic injustice – lies with the audience.

Birch makes this explicit in Scene 100 – Dinner Party – which has a cast of 14 featuring a head-teacher, a lawyer, a therapist, an architect, and a BAFTA winning documentary film maker who makes women-centred work that is ‘very Dynamic. Very authored. Full of movement. Aesthetically engaged’ (474). They indulge in a feast of labneh, fattoush and pomegranate dip, whilst snorting the cocaine delivered by the courier who has brought along her holiday cover so she can learn the route. In the midst of this seemingly socially aware group, the new girlfriend of A, who may or may not have had an abusive mother, interrupts saying:

This failure to ‘Listen or have a Complex conversation and Learn’, despite having access to information and knowledge that could genuinely impact social and cultural understandings about criminalised women, is, in Fricker’s words – ‘the preservation of ignorance’; an investment in the status quo where capitalist social order is maintained through a seeming to hear and care rather than actually hearing and caring. Without it, there will be no understanding, there will be no reform. This sentiment reflects the words of Jennifer Joseph, an actor from Inside Bitch, during a post-show discussion,

With [BLANK], Birch offers readers, theatre makers and audiences an opportunity to, echoing Jennifer, listen: to realise a radical ambition for theatre to attend to and witness the complexity of the lives of criminalised women; to invigorate understandings about how they are enmeshed in intersectional inequality and violence within wider societal structures of disadvantage.

Clean Break exposes the mechanisms of carceral society through its attention to the lives of criminalised women. For more than 40 years it has developed different organisational and artistic strategies in its commitment to new epistemological understandings about prison as a material and ideological fabrication of power relations in carceral society and, specifically, the experiences of criminalised women shaped by them.

Each of Clean Break’s plays offers a provocation to audiences to examine what we expect of narratives of criminalised women, why we expect them and how our understandings can fracture or re-iterate the social structures which continue to impact a life too often marked by stigma and shame. We argue that Clean Break’s work is an act of feminist social epistemology, with theatre practices expanding audiences’ ‘knowledge, information, belief and judgement’ (Reference Miranda, Graham, Henderson and HendersonFricker et al., 2019: xvii) about women and criminalisation. But it’s a dialogic process. Clean Break can make theatre, it can tour to a wide range of audiences, it can create spaces for dialogue, but it is up to individuals who make up groups, institutions, and society to do the creative, critical work of criminological imagining too.

An unwillingness to care enough to understand leads to what Reference Duakas, Fricker, Graham, Henderson, Nikolaj and HendersonDuakas (2019) refers to as epistemic marginalization, a kind of epistemic injustice which will ‘distort the social-epistemic landscape so that knowledge and other epistemic goods do not flow as they should’ (Reference Miranda, Graham, Henderson and HendersonFricker et al., 2019: xx). Clean Break’s work not only identifies this distortion but un-fixes the anchors of limited representation and epistemic injustice. The plays become new representational coordinates to navigate popular understanding and knowledge about women, crime, and justice. Holborough’s comment made in 1981 rings as true now and it did then (qtd in Palmer and Forlong, 1981):