tonycurzonprice

I imagine that prison would be endlessly dull. And that's a tough quality to represent dramatically - boredom. Sophie Besse, in her debut play, "A woman inside" (Etcetera Theatre, Camden, until May 6 2012) certainly avoids that. This beautifully acted & intense drama is about both brutality and tenderness, about dehumanisation, but also about the triumph of human qualities. No simple oppositions or cliches here.

The two central characters are inside, inside a cell together, but prison is also seeping into them. The guards get inside them - quite literally during the body searches; the smell and dirt gets inside one inmate, a beautician ... but Sharon, the violent, disturbed prisoner also lets music get inside her. Eventually and cathartically, she starts to get some of that inside out.

Sophie Besse has worked as a therapist in prisons and has taught drama to women prisoners. In the play, the women guards also occasionally let their guard down - they are women inside too.

There is no simplistic moralising in the play. Sharon is a tough nut, whatever she has inside, and whatever has toughened her. There are real victims to her crime. Guard number 1 puts on a protective, professional mask when she needs to. And daffy Barbara may be a loving mum, but it takes Sharon to remind her how selfish she has been to her daughter.

The intensity of the drama is amplified by the smallness of the pub theatre; the still louche surroundings of Camden Lock on a darkening evening is just the right context for those marginalised stories that we continue to have to learn to live with.

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Some of Luis' writing in English on openDemocracy - http://www.opendemocracy.net/author-profile/luis-de-miranda

Come to continue this conversation on March 2nd 2012, http://luisdemiranda.eventbrite.com/

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The SOPA fight was presented as one about fundamental rights versus greedy Hollywood. Tony Curzon Price talks to Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, the venture capital fund behind a lot of the most innovative and visible web companies of today, to try to understand: is it about principle, or the competing interests of big Tech vs. big Entertainment

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The SOPA fight was presented as one about fundamental rights versus greedy Hollywood. Tony Curzon Price talks to Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, the venture capital fund behind a lot of the most innovative and visible web companies of today, to try to understand: is it about principle, or the competing interests of big Tech vs. big Entertainment

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The SOPA fight was presented as one about fundamental rights versus greedy Hollywood. Tony Curzon Price talks to Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, the venture capital fund behind a lot of the most innovative and visible web companies of today, to try to understand: is it about principle, or the competing interests of big Tech vs. big Entertainment

The SOPA fight was presented as one about fundamental rights versus greedy Hollywood. Tony Curzon Price talks to Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, the venture capital fund behind a lot of the most innovative and visible web companies of today, to try to understand: is it about principle, or the competing interests of big Tech vs. big Entertainment

David Pryce-Jones in conversation with Tony Curzon Price about his latest book on radicals of the left and right whose anger with England and whose traumas led them to seek comfort and revenge in foreign causes. Is there really a common thread to Byron, T.E. Lawrence and Lord Haw Haw? And should one take care to distinguish reason from motive?

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Liberalism does not evolve and progress according to some internal process, but because of the historical challenges it has faced. Slavery, colonialism, anti-semnitism have all been a part of this. How do religious fundamentalism, environment and immigration challenge Liberalism today?

A conversation based around Dominico Losurdo's book, Liberalism, A counter history (verso)

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A conversation with Vaclav Stetka on Media/Politics/Business in central and Eastern Europe

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Yvan Guichaoua, West Africa expert researching non-government armed groups, describes what kind of force is Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb is, what motivates its members and what are the conditions of its success. Smuggling, fast cars, and the economics of ransoms combine with ideology to create a new threat.

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