Kate Rubin in a scene from "Gormenghast"
"He's been accused of being a bad actor for all these years and now he has a chance to prove all his critics wrong," says the inmate who plays Flay in Gormenghast – a stage adaptation of Mervyn Peake's gothic epic of a boy who wants to escape the shackles of tradition and experience life beyond the castle walls. And yes, you read that right. It's a play performed at the minimum security penitentiary William Head Institution.
Canadian prisons often produce prisoner publications and periodically turn out work by visual artists, but William Head on Stage is unique in the penal system. It's a testament to the power of theatre to change lives that this program – which is not only produced but also sustained by the inmates – is now in its 30th year. It's also the only theatre program in a Canadian prison that plays to the public.
William Head itself is a dramatic setting: a beautiful point of land surrounded by the Strait of Juan de Fuca, about 45 minutes outside Victoria in Metchosin. Audience members arrive at high double fences topped with barbed wire, and are checked in and scanned for contraband before being chauffeured by inmate valets to a gymnasium. Doors are locked at 7 p.m. – but before the curtain goes up, visitors mingle with their hosts in a reception area where prison-made carvings, bentwood boxes and aboriginal artwork are on display.
Ian Case, general manager of Victoria's Intrepid Theatre, is directing Gormenghast, his fourth play at William Head. He talks of the level of commitment and the visceral performances he's witnessed in such works as Macbeth, Waiting for Godot and Elephant Man.
"I think it's important to challenge them as artists," he says, adding that theatre is a good socialization tool. "Whether you like someone or not, you have to trust [that person]on stage."
Inmate Stan Livingston, who has participated in six productions, took over this year as president of the William Head on Stage Theatre Society. The program's rehabilitative effect, he says, is "massive."
As a show comes together, prisoners "overcome a lot of their fears and anxieties," he says. "They've gained new tools to express themselves."
They also learn business skills, raising money from sponsors and managing their box-office receipts to finance each year's production.
Frank Borg, who spent three years at William Head in the 1990s, says he got encouragement from a fellow inmate who was a published writer – eventually Borg penned both an adaptation of Albert Camus's The Stranger and a satire on prison politics, Left Over Crumbs, for the William Head stage.
After his release, Borg became a screenwriter, playwright and sometime movie actor, whose credits include scripts for Da Vinci's Inquest, The Collector and Shattered.
"I had never written before, and it gave me an option," Borg, now 55 and living in Toronto, says of the theatre program. It's an important one to maintain, he says, in a time of increasing restrictions on prisoners and a conservative attitude toward punishment.
In the absence of female inmates, the women's roles are filled by professional actors, who find the experience transformative too. Kate Rubin, who runs an acting studio in Victoria, is the Countess of Groan in Gormenghast. Doing the show, she says, draws on "big emotions, larger-than-life intense stuff, which they know really well. There's a positive release of that kind of emotion on stage."
She's also watched the effect on the men's self-esteem: "They're used to dealing with a lot of shame and [as actors]they get positive reinforcement from the applause and acknowledgment of the audience."
The plays often hit home in other ways, too. The inmates know the politics of power, Rubin notes, and they can add profundity to shows such as Animal Farm, Macbeth and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
"These guys have had some rough starts in life and some have made some pretty hard mistakes," she says. "[Acting with them]is hard work, but it's good work. It lights you up."
Gormenghast
- Adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s trilogy
- by John Constable
- Directed by Ian Case
- Starring Kate Rubin, Ingrid Hansen and inmates of the William Head Federal Institution
A more fitting environment for a production of Gormenghast would be hard to find. The male characters in Mervyn Peake's gothic fantasy – a trilogy completed in 1959 about the trials of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast – are vividly portrayed by men who show an acute appreciation for the struggle between absolute power and individual aspirations.
The inmates (who under prison regulations cannot be identified) put on a spellbinding performance – employing shadow puppetry, masks and ingenious stagecraft to convey Titus's difficult coming of age and his ultimate rejection of the heavy mantle of Gormenghast tradition and its insistence on "no change."
Victoria actor Kate Rubin plays Titus's cat-adoring mother Gertrude with dark humour and establishes the workings of a dysfunctional family. A grey-haired inmate in the role of Titus's father, Sepulchrave, handily lords over the first act, until the appearance of Steerpike, the kitchen boy determined to rule the House of Gormenghast after he kills Swelter, the cleaver-wielding cook, and takes over as Master of Ritual.
Steerpike is riveting, a menacing but seductive player convincing in his wooing and betrayal of Fuchsia, Titus's older sister, played by professional actor Ingrid Hansen.
All runs uncommonly smoothly: Stratford this isn't – but gripping? Indeed.
Gormenghast runs until Nov. 12 at the William Head Federal Institution in Victoria.
Special to The Globe and Mail