Is there life after life? Or life during life, for that matter? It's not reincarnation and existentialism that we're talking here, but rather long-term confinement at Her Majesty's pleasure, the life sentence. Paul Jepson and Tony Parker's sobering new reportage play, the third in the National Theatre's innovative 100-seater Loft space, worries at the question of whether current or former prisoners can ever hope to lead some semblance of a normal existence.
The "lock 'em up and throw away the key" lobby would not be at all pleased with the conclusion offered by this series of six interwoven monologues, all the words of which are taken from interviews with murderers. It soon becomes clear that the perpetrators of the crimes are victims too, at the mercy of childhood trauma, alcoholism and loneliness.
Our uneasy sympathy is encouraged by four of the characters' chatty narratives. There's more than a faint whiff of Porridge about Frank and Alan's tales of prison life, whereas the spectre of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads looms ever larger over Valerie and Edgar and their detailing of the minutiae of their "lives after". We could maybe grow to like these people, we find ourselves thinking. Can you remind us why it is that we're listening to them? Oh yes, they've all killed someone. Whatever the mitigating circumstances, a chasm of incomprehension can't help but reopen.
The laconic Philip (Richard Lintern) utters the evening's most chilling line, in his peculiarly bloodless way - "I don't know exactly when he became dead," he says of the way he battered, burned and eventually boiled his 18-month-old son to death. Under Jepson's direction, neither Philip nor any of the others, arranged in what's nearly a straight line, move more than a couple of feet. This lack of movement only serves to draw attention to the circularity of the stories and even six excellent performances (especially from Daniel Ryan's very Ray Winstone-like Essex wide boy Alan) can't stop the whole enterprise from becoming rather leaden. After 95 minutes, it's something of a relief to be let out of the theatre for good behaviour.
Life After Life
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