Tina Jay on Held: People in prison have the same creative ambitions and emotional needs

Held was originally two separate plays, Walking, which won the Windsor Fringe Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing in 2011, the other, Dog City, performed at LOST theatre in 2013. Both were directed by Richard Elson and we had the subsequent vision to bring them together. They are interlinked stories of five different prison inmates with broken lives, locked together through the chains that bind them.

The two younger inmates Jamie and Fynn – both played by the same actor Jack Brett Anderson – are connected by desperate circumstance, and who have quite similar experiences of the system. They come into contact with the older prisoners Cal, Sleat and Ryde, played by Duran Fulton Brown and Anthony Taylor. The two characters know each other and talk about each other but they don’t directly appear in both acts. Through the play they essentially both learn that in prison, nothing is free. Everything has a price.

I have taught in a men’s open prison, so I had direct experience of the environment these inmates are in, but the characters themselves are all fabrications. I am hoping to shed light on the realities of male prisons, but also to show people that we are all the same. Just because people are in prison, doesn’t mean they don’t have creative ambitions or the same emotional needs as everybody else. I have also taught in colleges and universities and my feeling is that there is very little difference from teaching in those places to teaching in prisons. I want Held to try to make people less judgemental, and more understanding that we all share a common link in our need to emotionally express ourselves and to be understood.

I think one of the hardest things about prison is not getting as much space as you need. Being in such close proximity with people who you may not want to be with and not being able to escape them: the play is about that and the complexity of human relationships. Whilst I’ve had a number of short plays performed in London theatres, this is my first full length play to be performed here, and after I won the award at Windsor Fringe for Walking, the director Richard and I immediately knew we wanted to develop it and take it to London. It’s been a long journey since then, but I am delighted we were awarded Arts Council funding and our intentions are for it to have another life post our Tristan Bates Theatre run as well, including plans for a UK and International tour.

This is my first full-length prison play, but one of my previous full-length plays Rotten Apples – about underprivileged young people – won the International Student Playscript Competition, judged by Alan Ayckbourn, and was performed at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. I am very drawn to writing about disadvantaged people, or people who are sometimes pushed to the outside of society often through no fault of their own, and to get the voices and feelings of these people represented, and more easily understood.

By Tina Jay

Held runs at Tristan Bates Theatre from 6 to 17 June.

Click here for tickets to Held