Performance: Jail Song

Silo Theatre

Review: Susan Budd

John Yelash calls up the ghosts of his mates, the men with whom he shared 11 years of imprisonment in his play.

Brutal, tragic and comic, their stories are an indictment of a system that seldom serves to rehabilitate lawbreakers, but entrenches them deeper in a life of crime.

He passionately pleads the causes of those who need help that internment does not give - alcoholics, drug addicts, sex offenders and men unfit to plead.

Yelash's stories form a stream as continuous as the lines of daffodils in the Wordsworth poem with which he begins the play.

He trudges the stage as he did the remand yard, telling tales so harrowing that the tender-hearted and squeamish could bear no more and left at the interval.

He pulls no punches in accounts of sodomy and violence, of the appalling number of suicides in our prisons.

But there is rough tenderness in his description of the songs shared in the long 16 hours each man is alone in his "concrete coffin" at nights.

And in the aid given by a patched gang leader to a poor soul unable to toilet himself, in the lament of Sophie, the drag queen vainly searching for love.

Anger powers his argument.

Much of that anger is aimed at the "unscrupulous bastards" who sit on parole boards and the probation officers who allow those unfit to plead to return to prison again and again.

He bitterly recalls his time in the pits, as a projectionist showing violent films such as A Clockwork Orange and a western so sick it was painful to hear its description, calling forth bestial reactions from inmates and officers alike.

The realisation that the shouts and grunts are identical to those of the crowd at Eden Park before the singing of God Defend New Zealand forms a powerful end to the first act.

Jail Song is passionate advocacy for reform of our penal system and also of our psychiatric system.

It is also fascinating social history.