Between Bars: A theatrical performance about life after prison reveals difficult truths about returning home | stage

WWhen we talk about crime and punishment, the idea of ​​repatriation is often absent, but incarceration and reentry are critical aspects of the justice system. These themes are at the heart of Giant on the Bridge, singer-songwriter Joe Mango’s urgent theatrical piece by director Liam Hurley, which premiered in 2024 and will go on tour across Scotland next month.

Manjoo says the idea was born out of a research project called Distant Voices: Coming Home, which revealed dire statistics on the number of people who leave prison and then return. “Research has shown that the process is often less about individuals and more about societal and structural issues – whether they can get a job when they get out, and whether they have any family left to support them.” Giant on the Bridge came about as “kind of a way to write an essay about what we’ve learned,” but using songs co-written by people who had lived through the prison system, Mango says.

For the project’s co-researcher, Phil Crockett-Thomas, the songwriting process revealed something profound. Over the course of approximately 20 intensive sessions in open and closed prisons and community justice settings, the team worked with approximately 200 people. “Coming home, being punished, and being separated from the outside world are very traumatic experiences,” she says. “What we found is that collaborative songwriting opened up more space for people to explore those issues in a way that was right for them.”

Often, participants chose not to write directly about prison at all. “They wrote about completely different things,” Crockett-Thomas recalls. “Or they wrote silly, wonderful songs.” She realized that music served as a “resource for the self” and sometimes a “quiet form of resistance” within the prison environment.

One of the show’s most striking moments comes from a song that audiences often assume was written by an incarcerated person. “It was actually written by a prison officer,” Mango explains. The song reflects the situation of a child whose father was absent due to military service, stressing that “although his father is not present in person, he is present on the phone and in our memories.”

Another song, Multicolored Bars and Chairs, was written by someone nearing the end of his sentence. The lyrics highlight the complex feelings that can be associated with release: “Don’t count the days, make the days count / Learn how to cope, nose like a bloodhound, I can smell the house / We’re human when we walk in / We resort to numbers, and we forget.”

One of the crowd favorites, Fuck It Button, came out of a songwriting session that brought community members into prison settings. A blunt statement by a recovery participant—“I know you want to press the fuck button, into oblivion and beyond”—resonates far outside of context. “That moment when you decide whether you’re going to do it or not — it exists on many spectrums,” Mango says. “It’s an example of the way songs bring different people together and combine different types of experiences.”

Hurley, whose co-writing credits include Mixer Maxter for the National Theater of Scotland and Rowan Rheingans’ first marginal letters on The Red Dress, led the collaborative writing of the script that accompanied the songs. He brought to the project recognition of theater’s ability to bear emotional and moral complexity. “I had not dealt with this topic before participating in it, but I saw the opportunity to have an intelligent, emotional and human conversation through theatre, based on songs that had already been written, about an issue that doesn’t often get talked about with a great deal of compassion or nuance,” he says.

One of the show’s strengths is its multiplicity of voices, and on stage, these songs are performed by a fantastic group of Scottish musicians whose individual identities help shape the storytelling. Besides Mango herself, the cast includes Louis Abbott of the group Admiral Vallow, Kim Grant (aka Ravelo), Jill O’Sullivan, and rapper Dave Hook.

Hurley describes them as “an independent Scottish folk group” and says that the theatrical magic of the piece lies in the collective act of imagination. “It’s that moment when the artist tells a story himself, and then he becomes the character,” he says. “You don’t need lights or sound or high production values ​​for this to happen. It’s a spark of intimacy and connection. And we couldn’t be more proud of the actors, because none of them considered themselves storytellers, and certainly not actors.”

Over the course of several iterations, the show has become more confident in its form. “In the beginning, everyone was trying so hard to do justice to the complexity and all the stories and all the people we met,” Crockett-Thomas says. “What was nice to see was that the show became its own thing as a result. It’s got this confidence and this independence, and it still relates with absolute sensitivity to those earlier steps.” “The audience is experiencing one story,” Hurley adds. “Despite the disparate stories we start with, it is a satisfying emotional journey.”

Crockett Thomas believes that the value of theater lies in its ability to contain contradictions. “Art can allow us to live vicariously through experiences we have not had ourselves,” she says. “And theater can do justice to the messy complexity of homecoming.”

The team has a clear view of the political context in Scotland. “I would like to see more challenge to the undeserved image of Scotland as a progressive country on justice issues,” says Crockett-Thomas. Despite some reforms, imprisonment rates remain high, and deaths in custody are among the highest in Europe. “Why do we build more and bigger prisons instead of trying to dismantle prisons?” she asks.

In the end, Giant on the Bridge offers no simple answers. What it offers instead is a shared space – to listen, to feel, to sit with discomfort. Hurley hopes audiences will leave “emotionally opened, intellectually stimulated, but also productively disturbed.” He sums up the spirit of the piece: “We can’t all talk at the same time, but we can all sing at the same time.”