Locked in emotion

Four Stars out of Five Stars

Michael Crowley is a self proclaimed believer in new historical plays, believing that there are ‘too many grisly realist plays’ in today’s society. However as Cell, his new play shows, this is something that he is incredibly good at. Cell depicts the story of a prison officer who takes Kelly, a young prisoner hostage following the suicide of a new inmate. It later transpires that the inmate who had committed suicide had been a sex offender, bullied relentlessly by those in the cells around him. For Scully, the prison officer, this signals the downhill spiral to ultimately, his mental breakdown and then his suicide.

As a writer-in-residence at a young offender’s institute, Crowley has developed this scene with young offenders and this is echoed in the truthfulness of the lines. ‘Everyone’s a bully in here’, Kelly proclaims, highlighting the brutality of this system. Alongside this, Joe O’ Byrne’s portrayal of Scully’s mental breakdown is terrifying in the scene in which he hurtles props across the stage leaving the audience, for a moment, genuinely worried. Cell is particularly effective in asking the audience to assert their own position on the role of bullying: the physical and mental abuse of sex offenders in prison is something that has long been accepted, and to some extent expected. The scene turns this notion on its head, discussing the fact that in a prison everyone is a bully leading to a vicious self propagating circle. It asks whether bullying can ever be solved with further violence or bullying.

The topic of bullying, Michael Crowley, argues is a difficult one to broach in prison leading to hostility, and defiance. In working through various scenes, however, he was able to encourage them to engage with topic, leading to often unexpected responses. What struck me about this play was the lack of bias regarding the presentation of the prison officers and the prisoners – neither are presented unrealistically favourably or, too heavily criticised. There were moments when I went from being repulsed by the criminal Kelly, to being endeared to him. It is the complexity of the characters that makes Cell such a success.

So for now it seems that ‘grisly realist plays’ are set to storm the UK theatre scene for some time to come.

The Cell ran at The Bolton Octagon Theatre on October