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by Dr Molly McPhee
Goldsmiths, University of London
Founded in 1998 and based in Newcastle, UK, Open Clasp Theatre Company works with women – inclusive of trans and non-binary people – with lived experience of what the company foregrounds as ‘exclusion’ from society.
Open Clasp’s focus on ‘exclusion’ indicates parameters of theatre-making that will bring the punitive cultures of carceral society into sharp examination. Open Clasp has worked with women experiencing domestic violence and abuse, racialised and gendered criminalisation, houselessness, and the prison system. They make a vital claim:
‘The theatre we co-create calls for revolution. It ignites activism and places theatre at the heart of personal, social and political change’ (Open Clasp, 2025)
Through three of the company’s works, Key Change (2017), Rattle Snake (2018) and Mycelial (2024), I explore Open Clasp’s strategies and tactics to effect this. What are the terms of co-creation? How might we interpret what revolution means through Open Clasp’s productions? How does activism instruct aesthetics and form in this theatre, and where does this push the politics of applied theatre? Each play is paired with a scholarly text that offers wider perspectives from applied theatre, prison theatre and performance theory.
Content Warning: these clips contain depictions of violence, sexual abuse, self-harm, drug and alcohol use, coercive controlling domestic abuse.
Key Change begins with a declaration: ‘This is the prison’. Four women in prison-issued sweatsuits jump across the stage with rolls of tape, laying down the boundaries of the prison’s walls. More than a declaration, This is the prison is one of the most powerful incantations in modern life. These four words immediately agitate a shared carceral imaginary (Fludernik 2005) that instructs not only our social behaviour, but our emotions, our understanding of social structures, capital and time. It also immediately conjures a highly regimented visual vocabulary, one that perhaps breaches your mind as you read this. We hardly need the rolls of tape. As carceral geographers Armstrong and Jefferson write, ‘When it comes to prison our imagination seems to clog up. It is the political solution to its own failure, and the preferred metaphor for its own representation’ (2017, 237-238). For societies that cannot conceive of life without prison – an entity so massively distributed in its impacts and reach – in many ways, carceral imaginary creates carceral reality. This tension is at the core of the importance of prison theatre, particularly in questions of why, what and how prison theatre performs, as well as the critical ethical dimensions of who creates it, and for whom.
Developed with women residents in workshops at HMP Low Newton, in Key Change, four main character stories take the audience to the ‘beginning’: plunging us into the circumstances and conditions that caused them to enter the justice system. Sexual abuse, addiction, domestic violence and houselessness are treated through ‘backstory’ narrative told in direct address to audience, and become collective experiences beyond the individual through shared lines, performed in chorus. Key Change draws on the company’s overall methodology of co-creation, which includes extensive conversations with communities and activist groups, facilitated in workshops that allow core issues and themes to be expressed, including via personal story. Together, the group decides on themes, storylines and possible dramatic arcs of the play. Catrina McHugh MBE, founder and Artistic Director of Open Clasp, then creates a scripted dramatic work that expresses through-lines of experience articulated by the group – these are anonymised. Hepplewhite (2020) charts the process of creating Key Change in detail, including navigating flexes of institutional power by prison officers, through to how the residents shaped the final script.
As a result of this process, Key Change becomes a kinetic nest of representation, in which living slivers of the institution are threaded alongside personal stories from women in prison, themselves amalgamated into character roles, all drawn together through intensely effervescent physical expression. The play always returns to mapping the spaces of the prison: the stage becomes stairs, shower blocks (‘Hey, no! There’s no showers on E’), then phone banks; at another point, we are in the van arriving at the gates of the prison, visitors’ area, then the chapel. A comedic bit suddenly sobers as one of the characters is abruptly told she cannot just ‘walk through a wall’, contrary to all of the preceding action of the play; at the end, they rehearse their walk out of the prison – only to go back ‘inside’ to the canteen. Though Angie, Kelly, Lucy, Kim and Lorraine leap between inside and outside, and within the spaces of the prison, the only spaces that we see played out beyond the institution are painful terrains of loss, abuse and pleasure-oblivion of addiction. We are entangled in the affective power of lived experience conveyed by the storylines, yet returned to the enduring structural conditions that cause women to be criminalised in the first place.
In ‘What Works: The Affective and Gendered Performance of Prison’, Aylwyn Walsh (2020) explores how affective experiences are created through and by prisons, and how applied theatre in prisons can investigate and intervene on the ways affect circulates within and is carried beyond carceral spaces, including into the theatre. Walsh considers the ways applied theatre can shape the experience and perception of women in prison, challenging binary and exclusionary frameworks: ‘applied theatre’s potential in criminal justice contexts is in its aesthetics, antagonisms to institutionalization and reliance on value that is explicitly not related to value or profit in capitalist terms, as well as extending gender repertoires’, Walsh writes (2020, 118).
Key Change leaves our perception of the women open-ended and fragmented: the wild hope of the piece germinates in the co-creative, activist space between performers and audience created through direct address. As Kim (Judi Earl) says to the audience at the end of the play, ‘When I get out, will you have changed?’
Rattle Snake opens on a square stage set with a small table, tablecloth, glasses, napkins and flower. Two women, Suzy (Christina Berriman Dawson) and Jen (Eilidh Talman) are folding napkins, inspecting the wine glasses, polishing them with their breath. There is a thud and their heads quickly turn to peer into the surrounding darkness. Every sound is a menace. They begin clapping and turning over glasses in a kind of game at first, looking over their shoulders from time to time, and soon their gestures become synchronised. They start singing, ‘I’ve got my ticket for the long way round’ from the song ‘When I’m Gone’. The women pitch to their feet as four huge bright spots suddenly illuminate them, and they begin recounting their experiences of domestic abuse at the hands of the same man, James. Suzy has survived a relationship with James, and Jen is 6 months into one – they swap playing the role of James to each other as their stories tumble out in rushes of adrenaline and fear. As in Key Change, tightly choreographed physical movement defines this piece, as seduction unfurls into control.
In 2015, Open Clasp was commissioned to create a play and interactive workshops for Durham Constabulary to assist in training front-line police officers on how to identify a complex range of coercive controlling behaviours in domestic abuse. The commission itself arose from a change in law that made coercive control a crime. Catrina McHugh interviewed a range of women who had called the police for help, and created the workshop from these interviews. Unlike Key Change – and Mycelial, as we will see – Jen and Suzy’s own stories are not the fulcrum here: instead, James’s characteristics, language, attitudes and tactics are analysed in forensic detail. In compressing James’s coercive behaviours, Rattle Snake gives immediate and explosive body to otherwise extended and covert strategies that abusers build over very long periods of time. When Suzy recounts her experiences in the courtroom with James, the stage turns to a boxing ring, allowing for a continuity of physical oppression to become visible in a setting where attacks are not allowed to become physicalised, but nevertheless deliver deep brutalities to the body and mind. To an untrained police force, the work brings to focus ways to identify the micro action as a tell for a macro campaign to dominate and control. The play’s development of James across a full spectrum becomes a tool that invites participants to externalise and examine forces of oppression. Rattle Snake’s development of the antagonist in the context of police training draws what is normally coded and dismissed as internalised oppression affecting victims into a living, breathing oppressor. In other words, not: how is oppression internalised, but rather: how can we externalise what we read as internalised oppression?
For many working in applied theatre, Rattle Snake in police training might amount to wriggling into a snake suit and laying down in a giant nest of rattlers. Yasmine Kandil discusses the complexities of delivering Theatre of the Oppressed workshops within police settings in her chapter for Applied Theatre and Ethics, ‘“Standing in the Trouble”: Tensions and Ethics of Engagement in Utilizing Applied Theatre in the Context of Police Training’ (2022). Drawing on her experiences growing up in Egypt during periods of widespread and authoritarian police intervention, Kandil addresses her initial reluctance to collaborate with police. Yet, increasing incidents of police violence against people experiencing mental health crises prompted Kandil to develop a drama-based methodology employing scenario work and role-play to train officers in de-escalation techniques. Kandil highlights the significance of relational engagement in applied theatre, focusing on co-creating scenarios that build trust and interaction – even when circumstances are tense, ambiguous, and shaped by gendered and racialised policies and procedures. Drawing on Haraway’s concept of ‘staying with the trouble’, Kandil proposes that meaningful resistance and transformation is achieved not through detachment or avoidance, but through active engagement with all those involved, including those who may be viewed as adversaries.
A red wash envelops a stage of platforms fanning out across multiple levels. On one, a figure stands in a bathtub; another has their back to a table, where they have just been discussing war and racism with the cat. The tallest platform has a table with a newspaper on it – we’ve been given the news that the Ever Given is stuck in the Suez Canal, halting all commercial shipping in the area. Specks of light – dust, stars, flashlights – float in a networking swirl between figures, platforms, shipping containers, talking cats and a giant bathtub. Mycelial borrows its dramaturgical structure from invisible, intricate mycelium networks that spread out through our ecosystems, our bodies and cultures. Although to the naked eye the play is less physically kinetic than Key Change and Rattle Snake, Mycelial’s largely stationary delivery pulses with connection points and resonances between stories from lesbian, trans women of colour, Māori, intersex, non-binary, neurodiverse sex workers. As what adrienne maree brown terms an ‘emergent strategy’ (2017), performing through and as mycelial constructs instructs the making of the play, its performance structure and its wider travels via live tour and film across many nations as a mode of relational activism, sharing resources and advocating for decriminalisation of sex work. The capacity of Mycelium (as organism, as play) for collaboration and regeneration draws together individual stories and experience in times of fracture and isolation, illuminating their connections like a dye in the waterway.
Mycelial was created as a piece of advocacy for decriminalisation, and this is key to the exchange between Open Clasp and the New Zealand Sex Workers Collective. While sex work has been decriminalised in New Zealand since 2003, in the UK and Ireland (as in many other countries), sex work is regulated by a part-criminalised approach known as the ‘Nordic model’: selling sex itself isn’t illegal, but activities like working together, advertising, or contacting clients are. Certain elements of this legislation receive public support due to their characterisation as anti-brothel-keeping measures; yet, under English law, a brothel is defined as any location where two or more sex workers operate together. This means that individuals working collectively for mutual safety may face charges of brothel keeping – a serious offence which can result in up to six years’ imprisonment, a criminal record, financial penalties, and potential registration on the sex offenders list.
Though the clip here presents a direct conversation between two sex workers, Erana (Michelle Huirama) and Jessica (Lexi Clare), it is an anomaly in the larger scope of the play, which relies on expressions of attenuated connection and correspondence – some on gestural levels, some on story-level detail (e.g. the motif of the Ever Given ship), some on phenomenological grounds (e.g. the ensemble turning, or not-turning, to listen). Erana has drowned multiple times, expressing an extension of activist mycelium that converts what kills into life. Abstracted from each other, yet drawn together through tiny ligatures of connection, including during the playmaking process of gathering and interpreting stories together, Mycelial develops what Jill Casid terms ‘intimate distance’, which ‘enables us to imagine and practice a domain of “feeling with” that holds in tension similarities and differences, individual case studies and statistical trends, the me and the not-me, the knowable and the ultimately unknowable and inaccessible’ (in Gotman 2022, 276-277). Performing ‘intimate distance’ in Mycelial articulates the intimate distance of sex workers, now and in the past, in collective futuring together. Body Politic, Kélina Gotman’s fourth collection of key texts informing debates in performance theory today, carries particular interest to explorations of how Mycelial functions as activist performance, as well as what it might propose as a lifeworld beyond carceral societies. In her introduction to Volume IV, Body Politic of Theories of Performance: Critical and Primary Sources, Gotman calls for ‘another grammar’ beyond capitalist logics – and I would emphasise here, carceral agency inherent to such logics – ‘To ‘perform’ then is to do, and also to allow oneself to be undone,’ she writes. ‘This means there is not only rigidification of alignment or affiliation, quantification frenzy or performative presenteeism, though showing up, holding fort, are strategically vital at times; […] again, we are in the swirl or the ellipsis, riding something of a tsunami. One could say ‘ride with care’; there is not of course any end in sight, but there will be many companions’ (2022, 5).
Key Change, Rattle Snake, Mycelial are just such acts of companionship. As we have seen across these three works by Open Clasp, convergences across what appear to be insurmountable distances within the prison setting and its infinite borderlands as carceral society articulate not only survival but thriving, in ways that take theatre to the limits of perception of criminalisation in subversive ways.
The video performances discussed here can be found in the Open Clasp: Theatre for Social Change collection. The first two linked chapters are contained in the Critical Studies and Performance Practice collection. The final linked chapter is contained in the Theatre and Performance History Collection. If you would like to explore these resources further and your institution does not yet have access, please ask your librarian to contact us to arrange a free trial.
Visit our Previously Featured Content page to view other topics including Shakespeare and Queer Theory, Global Theatre in Translation, Decolonizing the Theatre Space, Devising Theatre, Interpreting Shakespeare: Discover the First Folio, The Plays of Caryl Churchill, Women in Shakespeare, Drama without Borders: Stories of migrants and refugees, The Climate Crisis in Theatre, Black British Playwrights, and LGBTQ+ Playwrights.
