Review: Woodhill at Shoreditch Town Hall

Tuesday, 26th September 2023 at Shoreditch Town Hall

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Reviewer: Emma Dorfman

We’re brought into what strikes me as an evidence room: boxes on boxes stacked atop metal shelves that are posed in neat little rows and poorly lit conditions. What a container for a verbatim theatre piece.

Woodhill, however, is not entirely verbatim. That would diminish the inventiveness of the show’s genre. Combining movement and sound composition elements, physical performers and voiceover performers, Woodhill tells the stories of the prisoners who died at HMP Woodhill in Milton Keynes. Whether it is an institutional failure, a failure of the prison/penal system or a failure of the justice system is a decision that is largely left up to the audience, but you hardly want to answer it because the issue is just too big and important.

The theatrical elements are perhaps a response to the multiplicity and largeness of the themes within the work. Four physical performers embody the testimonies of the families of the deceased men alongside voiceover material, which is also performed by disembodied voice actors. Underscoring it all is an intoxicatingly haunting soundtrack (courtesy of Owen Crouch and Sami El-Enany) that explores elements of repetition, fades, and distortion. The movement from the physical performers responds precisely to, and amplifies, what is being explored in the soundscape: they are jerked, shaken, floated through space according to the demands of the soundscape and the voiceover material.

With all this being said, unlike in most verbatim pieces in which stories and testimonials are often the main elements the audience is directed toward, the several elements in Woodhill often threaten to pull you away from the story. Too often, I found myself transfixed by the naturalistic choreography (from Alexzandra Sarmiento) or obsessed with pulling apart the multilayered sounds that engulfed the space. Suddenly, I discovered I was losing bits and pieces of the story– crucial parts of these young men’s lives.

The story follows the families of Chris, Kevin and Steven: Steven’s mother (Marina Climent), Chris’s sister (Miah Robinson) and Kevin’s stepbrother (Tyler Brazao). It takes a while for the audience to situate these distinct characters, as both the dancers and the sound swirls across the stage. But ultimately, we discover that all three have died in their cells at HMP Woodhill, and we follow the families from their loved ones’ upbringings to their incarceration, and all the way through from their death to the inquests that were held following their deaths.

Throughout, experts are brought in via voiceover to discuss important but heady dilemmas surrounding the criminal justice system: ‘Locking people up should be a last result’, ‘Prison is an expensive failure’, ‘The justice system is like a hallway’. Symbolising all of these bigger, systemic themes is a fourth performer: an anonymous, smooth and slick man- a Ghost- (Stanley Duventru-Huret) introduces a new vocabulary to the three dancers we met on stage at the beginning of the show. He routinely tosses piles of dust and confetti as each new name (most definitely the names of prisoners killed at Woodhill) is voiced from above. This character possesses all of the dark camp of ‘HIM’, the infamous villain from The Powerpuff Girls series: at times, he oscillates between embodying the incarcerated men and acting as ‘judge’ during the inquest scenes. It makes for a dynamic embodiment of some (again) very vast, difficult-to-comprehend themes.

Woodhill is a piece containing many, many elements. But its themes are also just as innumerable and vital. What LUNG has done here is not only shaking the very complicated tree that is the UK justice system but also that of the UK theatre landscape. They have carried out a brave experiment of never-before-seen combination of theatrical languages, and I am eager to see how it progresses.

LUNG and The North Wall’s Woodhill is at Shoreditch Town Hall until October 7th 2023 – more information and tickets can be found here.