A decade ago, playwright Evan Placey explored the labyrinthine pressures on young women in Girls Like That. While that scorching drama stress-tested a secondary school’s sisterhood, Lifers concerns a similarly precarious brotherhood of older men navigating the corridors of their own institution. Lenny (Peter Wight), Baxter (Ricky Fearon) and Norton (Sam Cox) are long-term prisoners who we first meet playing cards. As their game progresses, it becomes clear that beneath the repartee each has their own strategy for survival and Lenny’s failing memory leaves him vulnerable to the other two.
They form an intriguing trio, and are convincingly performed, although the play could dig deeper into Baxter and Norton’s contradictory behaviour to their friend as Lenny is exploited and ultimately betrayed. More compelling is the relationship between Lenny and a young prison officer, Mark (James Backway), who adopts the role of his carer. That’s not in his job description, warns his colleague Sonya (Mona Goodwin), who draws a distinction between “duty of care” and “duty to care”. Prisons are there to protect the public but how, the play asks, can their inmates and staff be better protected?
Placey reveals a dysfunctional system where small kindnesses can be perceived not just as weakness but as professional transgression: witness Mark’s nervous glances to make sure no one is watching as he helps Lenny tie his shoes. The older man confuses him for his estranged son and Backway later doubles in that role, in a denouement exploring how violence, trauma and constraints of masculinity are passed down the generations. That scene is not quite acrid enough and the effects of Lenny and Mark’s own separation, too, need extra emotional charge but throughout Wight excels at swinging between affability and the anger caused by his confusion.
Tightly directed by Esther Baker for Synergy Theatre Project, which creates work in prisons and theatres, the production wears its thorough research lightly. Uncommonly, it is not didactic and neither patronises the audience nor tells us how to judge the characters, even when distressing actions are revealed.
Katy McPhee’s spartan, greyscale set reinforces the notion of a Prison Service stripped of resources and dogged by logjams, perilous waiting times for medical attention and staff burnout as officers struggle to separate their private and professional lives.
In dialogue peppered with colourful comedy, Placey has his characters retell the same stories. At first it conveys a sense of mundanity but as the distinction between memory and invention is blurred, there is a sense of stories clung to as personal comforts akin to the special pillow Baxter waits months to receive.
Its flashpoints could be sharper but the play authentically captures its setting and asks knotty questions about the rising number of older prisoners and about the state of the nation as well as its institutions.
• At Southwark Playhouse Borough, London, until 25 October
