Clean Break Theatre Company

This Element offers a sustained examination of Clean Break Theatre Company, the UK's longest running prison theatre company.

Caoimhe McAvinchey (Author), Sarah Bartley (Author), Deborah Dean (Author), Anne-marie Greene (Author)

9781009525893, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 October 2024

82 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 1.2 cm, 0.27 kg

Clean Break Theatre Company is a women-only theatre company that grew out of a prisoner-led drama workshop that took place between 1977–1979 in HMP Askham Grange. In addition to its considerable impact on criminalised women and public understandings of the socio-political impact of their experiences, Clean Break has had a significant but under-acknowledged impact on contemporary British theatre. We examine three areas of Clean Break's theatre making history and organisational practices: its origin stories; its education and engagement work; and how the company's performance practices have, across five decades, 'then' and 'now', adapted to directly intervene in carceral society. By highlighting Clean Break's distinct activist theatre making processes and practices, the book makes explicit the genealogical connections of the company's past work and its impacts on contemporary feminist theatre practices.

Introduction
1. Origin stories
2. Education as a practice of endurance
3. Facts, fictions and narratives of knowing in carceral society
Conclusion
References.

Subject Areas: Theatre studies [AN]