Out of The Joy

From the perspective of drama, the confined space of a prison cell, and the interconnecting lives of those who share it, is a space which automatically creates a natural miniature theatre. Paula Meehan's powerful and compelling play, Cell, opened this week at the City Arts Centre. This is Meehan's second play for adults, and is based on her experiences as a writer-in-residence in several prisons, particularly Mountjoy, over the last two decades.

"I stopped working there in the mid-1990s," she explains. "I felt so burnt out and so impotent. I had an enormous sense of rage and frustration because so many of the women I was working with weren't making it. I felt my heart was broken; that I'd be ill if I didn't take a break from it."

When Meehan says the women weren't making it, she means it in the most literal sense. Of the 12 young women who attended her first workshop in the mid-1980s, only one is still alive. The others have since died: from overdoses, AIDS-related illnesses, and suicide.

"For me, writing Cell was a way of resolving that experience. It's not a documentary of life in Mountjoy as such, but those stories of the women in the play are composite stories. I've met so many women like the characters in the play."

Cell, which is directed by Garret Keogh and stars Eithne McGuinness, Barbara Bergin, Laura Brennan and Joan Sheehy, is a Calypso Production. The theatre company was set up in 1993, to commission work which tackles social issues.

"I had already made notes for the play when Calypso approached me two years ago," Meehan explains. "I wouldn't have been able to accept a commission just cold, unless I already had an obsession for it. The four women characters were already in my head." She laughs, a bit embarrassed, but anxious to make the point nonetheless. "It was less that I had the idea for the play, than hearing voices of those characters. But hearing voices has a weird connotation, doesn't it?"

Of the four characters serving time in Cell, Delo (42) is in for heroin dealing; Alice (49) for murder; Martha (26) for shoplifting; and Lila (19) for possession of heroin. There is also a disembodied, robotic-sounding voice (Lisa Tierney Keogh), who controls access to the cell door, giving (or not) permission to visit doctors, the laundry, exercise, social workers and solicitors.

"I'm from the same social background as a lot of these women. I grew up with their mothers. These people aren't invisible to me. What's happening to them in prison is only a more extreme version of what's happening to them in their community. My recurring obsessions are about class, about the different levels of access and opportunity people have. People who know me well would say I'm working out parts of my own story in the characters in Cell."

Meehan's play focuses on power, and lack of it: Delo controls Martha and Lila, both of whom have solicited deals for her in prison and whose drug habits she keeps feeding. She rules the roost of their cell, a little dictatorship which is threatened by the arrival of Alice. Alice is an outsider on three counts: unlike the others, she is from the country (Leitrim), she is totally innocent of drug culture, and she's a murderer. In a wider context, the prison system controls all four women.

Robert Ballagh designed the haunting set of the cell: grubby, white-tiled walls, and grey metal bunks, creating a festering, claustrophobic atmosphere as the play unfolds. "Mountjoy is a kip," Meehan states flatly. "Robert Ballagh got all that into his set. It looks like an abattoir, with those tiled walls, and there's also a sense of a urinal to it, and a laboratory."

At the same time that Meehan was working in Mountjoy, she was also writer-in-residence in Trinity College, Dublin. "I was working in two institutions at the same time," she points out, clearly enjoying the irony of combining her references to these two places by using the same word. "And I was doing the same sort of work with both groups of people, even though they were from very different social backgrounds.

"I gave the same poems and stories to each group to work with, and it was amazing how similar the responses to them were. Each group had different life experiences, and they expressed themselves with a different type of language, but the responses were the same."

What are the memories that have stayed with her longest of her experiences working in Mountjoy? Meehan considers carefully. "In prison, information is power," she says after a while. "Writing workshops can be very edgy places. If someone writes me a piece of their story, their autobiography, that's something I know that maybe nobody else knows.

"Somebody has given you something which makes them vulnerable. I felt privileged to be trusted like that. And, of all the literary journals I've been asked to contribute to, the one that has meant the most to me was New Triangle (an occasional in-house journal in Mountjoy)."

Cell would probably be unwatchable were it not so powerful. It also has essential moments of black humour, chief among them being the spectacle of Martha doing cold turkey, while learning crotchet from Alice, who is herself working away at a blanket in the Leitrim colours of green and yellow.

When Delo comes back into the cell and sees them both crocheting, she remarks sourly: "You give a whole new meaning to the term needle exchange, Alice Kane." Meehan confides: "I actually crotcheted that blanket myself. Joan (Alice) is adding to it every night. It'll be enormous by the end of the run!"

Will there be a performance at some point in Mountjoy? Meehan looks guarded. "That has to be worked out," she says. "It's up to Calypso. I think it would be very provocative to stage it within the prison system. It's safer to them to bring in something like The Plough and the Stars. I know that a lot of women who have been through the prison system will come and see it here, but I hope that people who know nothing about prisons will be able to identify with it."

Meehan, who built her reputation first as a poet, has a fifth collection of poems coming out next year from Carcanet, provisionally titled Manulla Junction. "I hope to have the manuscript in next month. It might even be out by the end of the year."

She explains how much she enjoys the experience of being able to commute between the two genres of poetry and playwriting "With poetry, you spend so much time in your head. You forget about the pleasure of collaboration. Plays are ways of telling communal stories. Cell has been one of the best working experiences I've ever had. I love the danger of theatre, that space for transformation."

Is she interested in going on to explore the genre of fiction? "I wouldn't rule it out," she admits. And, given Paula Meehan's success to date with poetry and now playwriting, any future debut in fiction is bound to attract a great deal of attention.

Cell runs at the City Arts Centre until September 25th. It then tours to the Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, 28th29th; Granary Theatre, Cork, October 1st2nd; Galway Arts Centre, Nun's Island, Galway, 5th7th; Dunamaise Theatre, Portlaoise, 11th; and the Old Museum Arts Centre, Belfast, 13th -16th.

Further information on Calypso Productions from 01-6704539.