ABSTRACT
Clean Break is a women-only theatre company that grew out of a prisoner-led drama workshop at HMP Askham Grange, an open prison in the north east of England, between 1977 and 1979. Over the past four decades, it has produced over sixty original plays which expose women’s experiences of structural inequality and violence through criminalisation and incarceration. These productions have toured widely – to prisons, community centres, fringe venues, large-scale producing theatres and to the Ministry of Justice and House of Lords. While there has been some critical consideration of Clean Break’s work since the 1990s, the early years of the company’s practice has had, to date, little attention. Drawing on archival material and interviews with Clean Break’s founder members, this chapter recovers and examines the distinctive work of the company during its formative years. This early work addresses the material conditions of incarceration, the criminalisation of women who do not conform to legal or social norms, and theatre-making as an act of resistance to institutionalisation, dependent on self-organisation, self-representation and a commitment to directly intervene in the public imagination.
