Woodhill review

This is something of a departure for Lung, which specialises in campaigning verbatim theatre. Having explored the Bradford City Stadium fire and the pressures faced by young carers in its past work, the company’s focus this time is HM Prison Woodhill, a Category A male prison in Milton Keynes that has the highest suicide rate of any prison in the UK.

Writer and director Matt Woodhead has collected the testimonies of the relatives of men who died in custody, as well as people who work in the criminal justice system. He has used them as the basis for a cathartic dance piece, created in collaboration with choreographer Alex Sarmiento.

The show charts the story of three troubled men who were found dead in their cells: Kevin, Stephen and Chris. Four performers move through a room lined with boxes holding remnants and memories, while actors speak the words via pre-recorded voice-over. The dancers never speak. Instead, Tyler Brazao, Miah Robinson and Marina Climent use movement to share the three men’s stories. Their bodies twist and lurch, conveying a sense of immense distress of relatives knocked sideways by loss. A fourth performer, Chris Otim, moves among them, a masked ghost, hurling pockets of paper into the air.

Coupled with Sami El-Enany’s pulsing music, the effect is grimly relentless to the point where it can feel a bit like being pummelled. The use of dance results in something more primal and emotive than a conventional verbatim show, in a piece that takes the form to new places and, as with everything Lung does, it feels like the show is just the tip of things, a way of shining a torch beam on a broken system – a piece of theatrical activism.