“You Are against UK Law”: Clean Break Theatre Company’s Carceral Dramaturgy

Abstract

London’s Clean Break Theatre Company was founded in 1979 by two incarcerated women as an issue-based company devoted to “touring plays that revealed the struggles faced by women in prison” (“Our Story”). Over the past forty-five years, Clean Break has expanded the scope of its dramatic inquiry to focus not exclusively on women’s incarceration but also more broadly on women’s enmeshment in the carceral state. I argue that two Clean Break commissions translate the hard-to-conceptualize relationship between prison and the larger carceral state into a theatrical idiom that audiences can see, sense, and feel. In these plays – Winsome Pinnock’s Mules (1996) and Lucy Kirkwood’s it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now (2009) – I discover four specific, shared dramaturgical strategies. These elements, which I term carceral dramaturgy, cooperate to stage the dramatic protagonists as trapped within a punitive network of sites and policies.