Woodhill, which tells the story of three real deaths in custody through choreography, music and the families' own words, runs at Brighton Dome Corn Exchange this autumn carrying five stars from The Guardian and the Evening Standard.
The critics who gave Woodhill five stars - The Guardian and the Evening Standard among them - were not recommending a comfortable evening, and nobody connected with the production has ever suggested they were. It comes to Brighton Dome Corn Exchange this autumn.
The piece takes the deaths of three real men at HMP Woodhill, and the fight their families have waged since for answers, and tells it through gut-punching choreography and music rather than through argument. The words are the families' own, spoken as they set about investigating what had happened; the movement carries what the words are not able to.
That pairing - documentary theatre on one side, dance on the other - is what the notices have fastened on. It is also what makes it such unusual company in a Corn Exchange autumn that otherwise runs from circus to cabaret: a piece of reporting that happens to be danced, about a crisis in the prison system that has outlasted more than one attempt to fix it.
Brighton Dome programmes it in the same room as Inua Ellams's Once Upon a Time in Sokoto, and a fortnight or so of very different work either side of it.
Woodhill plays the Corn Exchange as part of Brighton Dome's autumn season, which runs across the Concert Hall, the Corn Exchange and the Studio Theatre.
