Open Clasp Theatre
Live Theatre
21/11/2018
I saw Open Clasp’s award-winning Key Change -- about women prisoners -- and found it extraordinarily moving and enlightening. so when I heard that Don’t forget the Birds was based on the post-prison experiences of one of the original inmates who contributed to Key Change, I was excited and intrigued.
The closed world of prisons, especially women’s prisons, is outside most theatre-goers’ direct experience, and has a built-in curiosity factor. Would like on the outside miss out on that fascination?
What I didn’t realise, until I scanned the programme notes after the show, to name check the cast, was that the actors, Cheryl and Abigail Byron, were playing themselves. This was their story, in their words. I had admired the bits of banter and the physical tableaux they presented between them. They’re really convincing in conveying this close but fraught relationship, I thought. Well, now I can see why. This is a mother and daughter playing themselves in their own words.
The set is starkly minimal, just stage boxes which serve as seats, cabinets and pedestals to stand on; metal vases of blood-red roses; and a frame which outlines prison gates, visitors’ room, security screening, and provides the hanging for the ‘Welcome Home Mam’ banner.
The focus is all on the two women, mother Cheryl and daughter Abigail. The dialogue is raw and real, sometimes muted with suppressed emotion, sometimes raucous, uncomfortably so.
So, what’s it like for a mother to come out of prison, to rejoin a daughter who’s been forced to grow up and cope in her absence, taking on adult responsibilities and chores?
The title refers to mother Cheryl’s last instruction to Abigail, as she’s taken away to serve her sentence: “Don’t forget to feed the birds. (And sweep the floor every day)”. Abigail admits she never knew you had to bleach the toilet. It’s through these telling details that the story becomes heartbreaking and compelling. Any mother can empathise with doubts about a newly independent daughter’s housekeeping, even if the independence is not forced by such a brutally imposed separation.
The play opens with Abigail waiting outside the prison for her mother’s release after serving two of her three-year sentence. We see Cheryl’s impatience with a lagging fellow inmate who is slowing down her release, and glimpse the simmering violence that brought her to this point. It’s funny, but also troubling, and that feeling recurs throughout. Should I really be laughing?
We flip back to the moment of sentencing, the shock: “We thought it would be suspended.” This becomes a motif throughout the piece, disastrously misjudged expectations, both in the past, woeful judgements of violent male partners, and in the future when neither woman predicts the difficulties of adjusting to Cheryl’s freedom.
One of the most telling bits is when Abigail relates how Cheryl constantly asks permission to perform ordinary actions. “Can I get out of the bath?” This underlines the reversal that their relationship has undergone. Mother now seems like the frightened child. Abigail finds it surreal, but Cheryl explains how in prison, she has to ask permission for every single act. It’s chilling. And of course we suddenly foresee the future difficulties.
The most poignant failure of adjustment is when Cheryl admits her guilt at not keeping up with friends she made in prison. We can understand the wisdom of not wanting to be drawn back into contact with people from her old life and yet also the awful personal cost of such caution.
What the play excels is in is avoiding easy neat answers and excuses, choosing instead to stay with the real -- at times alarming -- truth. This is not a simple narrative of persecutory violent men and poor women victims. When we get the back-story of Cheryl’s previous violent relationship with ‘Dale’ in wincingly graphic detail, we see also Cheryl’s violent self-defence. We laugh at her account of splitting his head open with a rake and him needing 17 staples, but it is an uneasy laughter of mixed relief and self-disgust. What are we complicit in here?
These are real people both in the sense that it’s their actual story, but also in that we see them in the round,with flaws and failures but also with their own unique history. For example, Cheryl’s pride in her background: that she was Miss Pears Soap, aged five; her father was one of the founders of the Notting Hill Carnival. We learn what it was like to grow up as part of a tiny minority of black people in the North East. “I never knew I was black, until some kid referred to me as that ‘darkie’, and I looked round to see who he was talking about.”
I came away heartened by the resilience of these women, happy that they had found their way to rebuild their relationship after prison, stronger and closer than ever. It was a glimpse into lives we don’t often see, especially told in their own words. What the writer and director have done is step back and offer a vehicle through which marginalised women can tell their own stories. Plenty of food for thought about our prison system and what little support is offered for those coming out, but always embedded in a true personal story, without preaching or worthiness.
Gerry Byrne
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