Rollercoaster behind bars

You can't help feeling that Eva, the drama instructor in Ron Hutchinson's new play, has read rather too much of Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country's Good, with its tale of convict settlers in Australia ennobled by a brush with theatre.

When she embarks on a day's session with a group of inmates at a Birmingham prison, she presumably imagines a similarly feelgood ending to their travails - she's doing something that matters.

The stocky and cynical prison officer she encounters on arrival, though, would disagree, holding the view that once a villain, always a villain, and no amount of communing with their inner selves will put them on the straight and narrow. And she's proved right as a series of warm-up vocals ("I wanna be a wall-a-by called willoughby"), exercises in trust and improvisation merely open cans of worms and highlight the them-and-us mentality as an extraordinarily naive, not to say provocatively dressed, Eva and her unwilling charges, led by the brooding Burdock (a highly watchable Michael Aduwali), jostle for control and territory.

There is an acute sense of the need for rules (and one of them is, don't give anything away about yourself) to help people on both sides of the divide get through each numbing day, and of the survival-of-the fittest pecking order from the powerful Burdock down to the tubby, put-upon Evans.

There's a degree of tension, too, between the watchful Eva (a strainedlooking Emma Fildes) and Claire Cogan's sarky screw, the latter recognising her plight of life with society's worst and no parole in sight as one prisoner asks her: "I've got three years and eight months to go, what did you get?"

Hutchinson's piece - part of the annual Edinburgh trickle-down - is stronger on claustrophobic atmosphere than content, with a roller coaster of emotion both explosive and concealed and the tension mounts and diffuses effectively under director Caroline Hunt.

Thankfully, there are no pat solutions at the end, but Hutchinson can't resist leaving us with just a smidgen of hope.

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