Working with prisoners

The first time Tanika Gupta walked into a prison - Winchester, as it happens - she gasped in disbelief. 'I was like: "Blimey, these places still exist." It was so... Victorian.'

Gupta - one of our leading Asian playwrights - was to spend the next three months there, running a writing workshop with its female inmates under a scheme established by Clean Break Theatre company. Ostensibly, she was under commission to research a play about women in prison, but she couldn't help becoming deeply involved in the women's own writing efforts as she encouraged them to dig deep into increasingly traumatising personal experience. 'There is literally nothing recreational for these women to do,' says Gupta. 'They have no library. Can you imagine? They kept begging me to smuggle them books. The only leisure activities on offer were hairdressing and needlework. No wonder they were all so desperate for their stories to be heard.'

As a writer, Gupta has never shied away from tackling the messier, more gritty narratives to be found in our social landscape. She has written extensively for Grange Hill and EastEnders; before that, she was a community worker. Her last play, Sanctuary, part of the National Theatre's Loft season, was about the Rwandan genocide. In that instance, the subject ultimately proved too big for Gupta's play but she is unrepentant. 'No one is writing about these things,' she says. 'There are stories out there that need to be heard.'

Gupta was initially worried that the Winchester inmates would treat her with suspicion, wary of letting some stranger literally take possession of their stories. 'But they were falling over themselves to write about themselves,' she says. 'There's no denying the therapeutic benefits of creative workshops in prisons.'

Although the final product, Inside Out, is not based directly on any one of the many stories Gupta heard while at Winchester, she is aware that all the women she met will have seeped into it in one way or another. At first, she worried that her brief - the play had to have only three women and to be about the criminal justice system - was too specific. 'Most of the women in Winchester were there for drug smuggling,' says Gupta. 'But in nearly every instance their relationships with men - be it husbands, fathers or boyfriends - loomed large in the background. So it was difficult to write about just women without making direct reference to the men in their lives.' The play itself - a three-hander about two sisters, one white, one black, and their prostitute mother - looks at the impact on a family when a member is convicted, and what happens when she returns home. 'Nearly every woman said to me that they could never return to their families when they got out, because they would immediately find themselves back inside again,' says Gupta. 'For many, their families were at the heart of the problem.'

Gupta never says anything directly, but it is hard not to detect an implicit criticism of the system every time she opens her mouth. 'There's little provision made for women on their release; no bus waiting at the gates, nothing to help them establish themselves independently,' she says at one point. And later, describing the day Inside Out was performed to the women in Winchester: 'They got so involved; they were cheering and crying as they watched it. But when it was over, there was nowhere for them to go and talk together about what they had seen.'

Female offenders, their reasons for being in prison, and how they cope once they are out, remains a highly complex, subtle and largely silent subject. Recently, the Scottish playwright Rona Monro caught something of this complexity in her devastating play Iron. Gupta is aware that, with Inside Out, she too is giving a voice to one of the most disenfranchised groups in our society. 'Let's just hope it's good, then,' she grins.

Inside Out, until Nov 30, Arcola Theatre, 27 Arcola Street E8, Mon to Sat 8pm, £8, £5 concs, Tue pay what you can. Tel: 020 7503 1646.

Rail: Dalston Kingsland