Going through the air locked doors, I have to say, was notoriously exciting, I was going to see where the ‘bad people’ were kept. Maybe we’d hear them! Maybe we’d see them! How ignorant and simplistic we make our lives! How very Molina! And yet, inside, it was stark and cold and empty of personality. The cell is stripped of all individuality and as far as possible, any opportunity to make a tragic escape through suicide. Due to the plumbing, you can’t even flush your own waste away. You have to press a button and the custody officers come along and do it for you. The two cast members, Matt and Pete, were each locked in a cell for a short time. And then locked in together. And suddenly, the sheer boredom, futility and hopelessness hit home. When I can download films in 3 minutes, organise my life on a crackberry, when we are advanced to a point where not even technology can keep up with itself, we can’t escape the fact that often, rehabilitation doesn’t work. That innocent people are sometimes incarcerated. That poverty has a direct relationship to crime. That if, as a society, you accept that certain elements of society live in dilapidated tower blocks and go to failing primary schools in the second city of the sixth largest economy in the world, then isn’t inevitable that leaving school without qualifications increases the likelihood of offending? Without thinking, at the end of our session, whilst still inside the prison; the cells with inmates were steps away, I announced that I needed a beer, a little too loudly and clapped my hand over my mouth instantly when I realised what I had said.

Directing Kiss of the Spider Woman offers a rare opportunity to take the completely familiar and the utterly foreign and make it personal, significant and utterly present. You can’t escape. And I wouldn’t want to.

The most interesting thing about the prison visit for me was how it felt to be shut into the cell, and – particularly – that there’s nothing to look at once you are. Just bare walls – no window. As actors when we’re not talking to someone else on stage we tend to do a sort of “stare off ino the middle distance” type of a thing… )or is that just me!) I’ll be expermienting in rehearsals with trying not to do that – I need to remember those blank walls just a few feet away from me.