Timberlake Wertenbaker | Bouquets & Brickbats

31/08/24

The Cameo, Edinburgh

It’s National Cinema Day and picture houses across the country are offering tickets for a mere £4. The Cameo is packed to the rafters. Does this mean that cinemas could sell out regularly if they lowered their prices, or is the mass turnout down to the sense of a special occasion?

The programming is important too, of course. Sing Sing deserves to draw the crowds, even at full price. It’s a weighty, life-affirming piece of work, humanising the inmates of the titular maximum security prison. It’s also a timely reminder of why the arts are so important.

Based on John H. Richardson’s book, The Sing Sing Follies, Greg Kwedar’s movie is all about the RTA programme (Rehabilitation Through the Arts), which provides customised curricula of theatre, dance, music, etc. in prisons across the USA. Each jail has its own steering committee of prisoners, and external facilitators to help them explore their ideas. The benefits to both inmates and wider society are clear: by offering troubled people hope, allowing them the chance to explore their feelings and develop skills, to improve their self-esteem, the severity of infractions within prisons is reduced – and so is recidivism. The urge to punish, to make correctional facilities as unpleasant as possible, is perhaps understandable but it’s self-defeating. If we want a better world for everyone, we have to accept the evidence and give incarcerated people as many opportunities as possible to improve their circumstances.

Colman Domingo makes a thoughtful, impressive John “Divine G” Whitfield, a central member of Sing Sing’s RTA group. Divine G – who has a cameo appearance – writes plays as well as performing in them, and also works tirelessly to support other inmates with their appeals. Apart from Paul Raci as volunteer drama leader Brent Buell, the rest of the cast comprises ex-prisoners playing themselves. Co-lead Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin is especially affecting: his transformative journey from bullish gang member to esteemed performer might be predictable but it’s absolutely compelling.

We shouldn’t need reminding that theatre matters: we’ve known it forever. Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good both immortalise the real-life production of The Recruiting Officer performed by convicts deported to Australia in 1789. Margaret Atwood’s fictional account, Hag-Seed, doesn’t just illuminate The Tempest for a contemporary audience, it also advocates for arts in jail. Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke (1920s and 30s) were created precisely to focus on the process of creating drama and the impact it has on actors. Here, in Clint Bentley’s gentle, often funny screenplay, we see again exactly how life-changing theatre can be.

Kwedar wisely steers clear of the violence we are accustomed to in prison movies: the menace is there, but it’s in the wings. Instead, we get to see the men at their best, when they’re engaged in something they really care about. As Sean “Dino” Johnson points out, “We get to be human in this room.”

And human they are. As a teacher of creative drama (albeit with children, not criminals), I’m not at all fazed by Buell’s bonkers-sounding playscript, Breakin’ the Mummy’s Code, which incorporates everyone’s ideas, including time travel, Freddy Krueger, ancient Egypt and, um, a couple of Hamlet’s soliloquies. That sounds just fine to me! It’s heart-warming to see how much it matters to the men, how seriously they take the acting exercises and the director’s notes, how much fun they have when they’re finally on stage.

Sing Sing is an important film, but it’s a highly entertaining one too. Beautifully crafted, with cinematography by Pat Scola, you’re guaranteed to leave the cinema with a smile on your face and a sense of hope for the future.

4.7 stars

Susan Singfield

02/10/15

National Theatre, London

Our Country’s Good is undoubtedly a wonderful play; the text is intense, thought-provoking, heartbreaking and funny. Based on Thomas Keneally’s novel The Playmaker, it tells the tale of the first convicts deported from Britain to Botany Bay, and how they put on a production of The Recruiting Officer in honour of the king. Even on the page, it has the power to make the reader question the very nature of humanity, and to consider how theatre can aid the civilisation of the most troubled soul.

A shame, then, that the National Theatre’s production, directed by Nadia Fall, should play up the comedic aspects at the expense of everything truly important in the play. We laughed, yes – but we didn’t cry.

The set is magnificent, and the opening moments genuinely awesome, the rotating wooden stage splitting and rising to reveal the ship’s hold, an unfortunate convict lifted through the hatch to be whipped. But the ensuing cacophony of singing and shouting from below means that we hear neither the convict’s cries nor the subsequent silence, and the unbearable sight of seeing a man so maltreated has barely any effect at all.

In truth, it’s just not grimy enough: the prisoners’ plights not desperate enough to make me yearn for their redemption in the way I have in other productions I’ve seen. By foregrounding the comedy, Fall has sacrificed a key ingredient of the play: the abject misery and desperation which marks the convicts’ lives. Nor do we get a sense of what the officers suffer: they too are far from home, cut off from everything they know. But it’s hard to feel much empathy here, when their brutality is rendered so superficially.

But it’s the music that really undermines this piece. Cerys Matthews’ score is clearly thoughtful and well-intentioned, but – for me, at least – it really doesn’t work. It undercuts the tension instead of heightening it, impeding the audience’s emotional response. The scene where Harry attacks Duckling, for example, is rendered absurd by his sudden bursting into song.

There are good things too: Lee Ross skewers Sideway’s pretensions with deft precision, and Matthew Cottle’s Wisehammer is nuanced and complex. But they’re not enough to save this production, and that’s a crying shame. It could so easily have been a triumph.

2.6 stars

Susan Singfield