07.03.1996

Battle against all odds

Helen Ellis reviews '20-52', directed by Jeremy Weller for Grassmarket Project at Tricycle theatre (NW6, Kilburn tube, 8pm, £7.50-£13, Mon and Sat matinee - pay what you can)

The title of this play is taken from the HM Prison Services form F2052, ‘Self-harm, At Risk’. Stephanie Lightfoot-Bennett played herself at the press night of this production. She tells the story of her twin brother, Leon, who died in police custody in Manchester in 1992. At present she is preparing for a third inquest into Leon’s death and in future performances her part is played by Kezden Jordan.

There is appalling secrecy surrounding deaths in custody and officers involved are rarely prosecuted, usually preferring to take convenient early retirement. Since 1990 there have been 301 so-called self-inflicted deaths in prisons in England and Wales. Leon’s death would have been written off as suicide had not Stephanie herself been a keen amateur pathologist.

When she arrived to identify Leon, she and her other brother had to demand a full examination of his body after noticing bruises all over his face. His nose had been sliced off and his knee caps twisted around.

The whole story is told by Stephanie in a reconstruction of the campaign to date. It is her incredibly courageous performance that holds the riveted attention of the audience. Stephanie has reached deep into the most painful emotions lodged inside her own experiences and lays them bare on stage. At the end of the performance she talks directly to the audience about the campaign and its links to other cases. In a less possessing performance this could have been too flimsy but the performance locks the audience into the personality of Stephanie and her struggle against all odds.

Stephanie battles not just against the thugs in blue but the full force of the slick and violent cover-up machine of the state that they serve.

The other characters in the play are perhaps its only weakness. The play is devised and performed by non-professional actors. From this undoubtedly comes its strength in the untheatrical, tormenting, straightforward telling of the story. But it is clearly Stephanie’s story and the other characters lack depth, falling into unconvincing stock comic parts at times, such as her brother and the racial equality campaigner.

Stephanie’s is an individual stuggle against the violence done to her brother and therefore to herself, but also against a world - represented by all her relationships - which colludes with this violence, or at least offers no way out.

From the campaigners who have lost sight of the human battle they are waging under a mountain of case study notes and therefore are completely unable to engage with Stephanie’s suffering; to the ‘campaigning’ journalists who give veal calves more hack space than human beings and the inhuman world which tortures itself and the world around it; to the boyfriend who, locked into this world of violence, cannot express his love in any other way but a violent one.

Stephanie’s isolation produced by the loss of the only “unconditional”, the only real human relationship that she has ever known, is all-embracing. The relationship with her twin in a small but dramatic way was able to break through the isolation, the total inability to relate to a world that has become alien to us. The ripping apart of that relationship and the consequent knotted void of Stephanie’s existence is brought powerfully to the stage.

The battle itself does not give the answers. A plea is made for justice. But what does this mean when so-called justice gives no hope for the mass of society? When young unemployed people who turn to crime are locked up in prisons? When everyone is a scapegoat for somebody else’s crime?

But the performance is so passionate and so honestly presented that it cannot help but take those that want to listen closer to an understanding of the violence committed against the vast mass of individuals.

Stephanie says in the play that she is not political. But politics is not just about the useless talking shop and slanging matches in parliament. It is not even just about what placard you carry. It should be precisely about the passionate need to free ourselves from a dehumanised world.

The play hopes to raise the awareness of Leon’s case and about deaths in police custody. For those who go to watch, it will most certainly do this in a way that surpasses even perhaps the best orators. But perhaps the play is strongest in taking us inside the prison of violence, both emotional and physical, which, under a violent and oppressive state, we direct against each other.

Helen Ellis