Fooling the Prison:
I had never been in prison before so it was with a mixture of fear, nervousness,
excitement and ignorance that I was admitted into West Hill Prison, Winchester, in
April 2007. I was working as clown advisor on a production of Alfred Jarry’s, Ubu
the King (2007). Ostensibly I was the clown expert with all that the word entails, yet
I myself was the naïve fool in the project with images of prison culled from film and
TV. Would it be like The Shawshank Redemption? Looking back on the experience I
am reminded of Philippe Gaulier’s definition of the clown, as someone who has, ‘le
caca dans les pantalons’ as well as that feeling, well known to clowns, of being an
impostor, a fake, especially as my practice has not been text based and nor is it based
in applied and community theatre. But then I am comforted by the fact that many
classical clown entrees are based upon the clown as impostor, the clowns pretending
to be what they are not. The play was adapted and produced by Annie McKean, a
Drama Lecturer at the University of Winchester, and the project received funding
from the Arts Council of England, and the University. Annie had run theatre projects
in the prison since 2002 in which prisoners and undergraduate students on the Applied
Theatre module performed in the play together. It was co-directed by a third year BA
Drama student and the prison Drama Tutor who had been a student at Winchester
herself. There was no selection process of students and the male prisoners from West
Hill chose to take part, although their participation could be terminated by the prison
authorities at any time. This paper then reflects on various clown practices: those
which were employed as a means of both unlocking the text and providing a
framework for the production, as well as a mode of performance, were officially
sanctioned and highly visible in the project itself. And yet there were those which
were disguised and unofficial. This was clowning by the prisoners and other
participants outside the project and throughout the production. These provided a
counter-narrative to the regulative constraints of the prison.
But what I’m not going to do in this paper is provide a textual analysis of Abu
the King, but for the benefit of those of you who may not know the play here are a
few words on it. Begun in 1888 when Jarry was a 15 year old schoolboy, and loosely
based on Macbeth, it is a darkly comic tale of corruption and power in which Ubu,
abetted and controlled by his wife, Ma Ubu, murders all those who get in his way on
his rise to power as king. Jarry wanted it to be played in a totally non-realistic
1
manner, and employed an invented and exaggerated language, which has been
difficult to translate into English. It opens with the word ‘merdre’ which has been
variously translated as ‘Pschitt’ or ‘Shikt’. It has been hugely influential especially on
the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, but also on Dada, Surrealism and perhaps The
League of Gentlemen. In The Empty Space Peter Brook maintains that it is play
which needs to be reworked and exploded for it to have contemporary resonance
(1990: 77-78).
Banned after its first theatrical performance in Paris in 1898, which
caused a huge scandal, nowadays the language, scenography and dramaturgy seem
tame, but when I first read it myself as a schoolboy I found it highly subversive. That
was many years ago and I was very naïve. But I was introduced to it years later
during my training with Philippe Gaulier, who used Ubu as an exemplar of the
grotesque bouffon.
So it was a challenging choice of play for performance by prisoners in a
prison. Nevertheless it had been officially sanctioned by the authorities and the
subversion was permitted. What interested me more after the event was the nonsanctioned or ‘disguised’ clowning in the prison. In Asylums: Essays on the Social
Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1991) Erving Goffman analyses
closed institutions, focussing mainly on mental asylums, but also prisons, which he
calls ‘Total institutions’. He writes, ‘A Total institution may be defined as a place of
residence and work where a large number of like situated-individuals, cut off from the
wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally
administered round of life’ (1991:11). ‘Total institution’ is a somewhat misleading
term, as it is total for only a percentage of people in the institution. A large
percentage of the population in a prison are the prison officers, administrators,
education officers, and external visitors, such as me, who are able to come and go,
although they may be constrained by institutional practices, time keeping, security
measures. There is institutional stripping of identity. However, in common with
other institutions even Total institutions are a hybrid of what Scott terms the ‘three
pillars’ of the institution: the regulative, the normative and the cultural-cognitive. The
prison appears to be a total institution but is in actuality quite permeable, and the
deliberately simple and obvious comic practices of the clown reveal its fissures,
cracks and fault lines.
2
I’ll briefly sketch Scott’s three institutional pillars, which draws on a vast
number of historical and contemporary sources and approaches from scholars of social
theory, economics and political theory. It provides a lens through which it is possible
to see how and why the behaviour of the human actors in an institution are regulated
and constrained, but also empowered and enabled by the methods and ethos of the
institution.
The regulative pillar frames the workings of institutions in the broadest sense:
In this conception, regulatory processes involve the capacity to
establish rules, inspect others’ conformity to them, and, as necessary,
manipulate sanctions – rewards or punishments – in an attempt to
influence future behavior. These processes may operate through diffuse,
informal mechanisms, involving folkways such as shaming or shunning
activities, or they may be highly formalized and assigned to specialized
actors, such as the police and courts. (2008: 52)
The normative pillar owes much to the individual in the institution conforming
to what Scott refers to as the ‘values’ and ‘norms’ of that institution: ‘Normative
systems define goals or objectives (e.g. winning the game, making a profit), but also
designate appropriate ways to pursue them (e.g. rules specifying how the game is to be
played, conceptions of fair business practices) (p.55). Scott adds that the expectations
are frequently prescriptive and goals and objectives are set which the actor must attain
or risk sanctions. A normative system constrains behaviour but also enables its actors
giving them certain privileges and power (see p.55).
Scott defines cultural-cognitive institutional practices as ’…the shared
conceptions that constitute the nature of social reality and the frames through which
meaning is made’ (p.57). Meanings arise in interaction and are maintained and
transformed as they are employed to make sense of the ongoing stream of happenings’
(p.57). I take this to mean that an individual’s internalised, subjective understanding
of specific institutional practices and methods become externalised into agreed set
procedures and methods. The institutional practices may not be overt and may be
invisible, but all actors recognise them. Individual actors contribute to the processes,
and since the internalisation by the individual is constantly changing and moving,
particularly in small ways, so the institution itself is constantly readjusting to
circumstance. The cultural-cognitive pillar does place a great emphasis on each
3
individual contributing to the shaping of the institution. From my reading, in cultural
cognitive framings of the institution there is less emphasis on the global forces and
historical contexts which shape institutional practices.
Yet as the philosopher Jacques Ranciere In The Politics of Aesthetics (2007),
maintains, there have always been and still are those who are outside the polis and
therefore are unable to participate in the processes of decision making in a democracy.
It is not that they cannot speak, they may even be allowed to speak, but they do not
speak in the right ways; therefore they cannot be heard and so are ignored.
It is also probable that the extreme regulative practices, in Scott’s paradigm, in such
an institution are endorsed by those in charge at all levels, and that the institutional
regulative culture conditions all aspects of the practice.
My role in the project was two-fold. I ran two day long workshops on
clowning for the cast and production team, which included students, prisoners, as well
as director, producer and education officer. I also sat in on rehearsals as clown and
mask director. I started with the Lecoq/Gaulier inspired method of teaching clown,
with its emphasis on openness, play and complicity, whilst placing the clown practices
in a structure which grounded that practice, and emphasised the relationship with the
audience and the fact that these techniques and structures of the clown trio would be
employed in the performance of Ubu the King itself. In the first workshop, which took
place in the prison chapel, an institution within an institution, the actors were trying
hard to clown, but not playing freely, so I bunged on the red nose and started
improvising. This led me to pick up the altar cloth and put it round my shoulders as a
shawl. This playfully transgressive act lightened the atmosphere and gave permission
to the clowns to play. I was both the representative of the institution, the insider, who
was saying that it was OK to transgress, and the outsider who does not know the rules.
Later on in the workshop, one of the prisoners said apropos of the exercises that there
was a lot of clowning going on here, and I responded, ‘Yeah, look at all the prison
officers, although they don’t know it’, which made everyone laugh. (You had to be
there). In the second workshop we worked on clown status and structure, especially
the ‘classic’ clown trio, although here I placed it in the context of the play, noting that
there are many examples of the trio throughout, for example, Pa Ubu, Ma Ubu, and
Billikins. We were not attempting to find ‘one’s own clown’ in the Lecoq sense, I
4
referred to above but envisaging the play as a series of clown entrees about power. It
was during this second workshop that I mentioned, very much in passing, that I had
seen some clown troupes, such as Mimirichy, in Kiev in 1987, who, through their
clowning were complicit with their audiences in critiquing a repressive society. The
cast eagerly embraced this notion for our production. Ubu is a beautiful gigantic
raspberry blown at all authority and morality, and is usually played in a deliberately
cartoon fashion, nevertheless the exaggeration means that audience reads it as both a
harmless pantomime and as an amoral fable about power. When I interviewed some
of the prisoners afterwards they noted the subversive nature of the play and how it
related to their situation. However they saw acting in plays or putting on the
Christmas cabaret as a carnivalesque act. It was an escape from the strictures, routines
and timetables of the total institution. However, in a later interview with several
prisoners, one also commented upon clownesque behaviour as a mechanism for
survival in the otherwise regulated life of the prison, ‘We use clowning to get through
it. It’d be boring otherwise (Interview on 15th September 2007). The others concurred
and added examples of this behaviour, which ranged from horseplay, for example
pulling another prisoner’s tracksuit bottoms down, to jokes and irony. In rehearsal one
prisoner mentioned that if the governor didn’t come to the performance he personally
would ‘go round and have a little word with him’ (joke made during rehearsal which
made us all laugh).
But clown is not the only mechanism for survival of course.
During breaks in rehearsals I observed prisoners smoking by the iron bars of the gate
that served as an exit to the gym where we rehearsed. They could just get their hand
out through the bars and a foot out underneath. This was freedom.
My slice of the institution was partial and subjective: many locked gates, walls
topped with barbed wire, a gymnasium which served as a rehearsal space for actors,
the weights room for prisoners working out, and as the performance arena. I did
witness several examples of extreme regulative practice and power. On one occasion
a female prison officer walked into a rehearsal in the gym. Without saying a word to
anyone, including us visitors, she pointed to one of the prisoners who was in the
middle of rehearsing and beckoned to him to follow. He looked very worried and
immediately left with her, mid speech, returning about an hour later. In the meantime
Annie McKean went to the Education Director and made a complaint about this
behaviour, although of course we too were there on sufferance by the institution. This
5
incident was an extraordinary display of both power and insecurity by the prison
officer, and I caught a glimpse of the total institution. In this case clowning would
have had no effect, and would have been pointless. Jokes were made about it but only
the day afterwards: ‘Where did you get to yesterday?’ ‘Oh my chauffeur called to take
me out’ (Joke after the incident, vaguely remembered).
Mindful of Donald McManus’s observation in No Kidding (2002) that the
figure of the clown can step out of the fictional world of the play and into the real
world of the audience, we agreed that we needed a new character which would further
explode the monologic institution of the play performed at the audience and make it a
dialogic conversation with the audience. Annie felt that a Boalean joker figure would
be appropriate, and after long discussions this morphed into a jester character who had
a threefold role: he could fill in the missing links of the adaptation, ask the audience
their opinion of the events, and keep the play moving swiftly along. We were
fortunate that the prisoner who took on the role was an excellent trained dancer, actor
and improviser. He spent a great deal of time writing his links as rhyming couplets.
In a nod to Brechtian alienation he also was furnished with a jester puppet who
questioned the audience about the morality of the adaptation, but spoke for the
prisoners themselves. He took the puppet back to his cell each night to rehearse with
it and it became the source of a secret running joke between us all. Would the officers
wonder where the new prisoner had come from? Would the puppet be shipped off to
another prison overnight and we wouldn’t see it again. Would the puppet be given
meals and work detail? Would the puppet have to exchange his jester’s costume for
prison sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms?
These jokes provided a conduit for release and helped create a strongly
collaborative atmosphere. They also became a method for me to reference a basic
mode for play which, as so often happens with clown practices, the performers
abandon in the serious business of rehearsal. Performers will play beautifully in
warm-ups and games but as soon as they pick up their scripts they become tense and
forget their audience; they forget to metaphorically pull each others tracksuit bottoms
down. And in fact throughout the rehearsal process and in the performances the
performers, specially the prisoners, often did find a playfulness with the text and for
the realisation of that text. This included devising specific songs and slapstick which
6
the prisoners themselves created and rehearsed, exploding the Jarry adaptation itself,
but also a more basic but stronger improvisatory impulse, that of fooling about, which
allowed the actors to free themselves from the institution of the text. In performance
the actors found a further dimension of play, as they performed with and to their
audience, none more so than the prisoner who played the jester figure. During one
performance he was heckled by another prisoner in the audience, and he immediately
responded in rhyming couplets which he had improvised on the spot.
Play, improvisation, le jeu, complicity: this nexus of clownesque ingredients,
so weighty and so simple, requiring many years of practice to master, although it can
never be mastered or understood except through practice, incorporation, and even then
you realise how little you know, became the vital tools in unlocking the subversion
which reveals the cracks in the prison, for in a predominantly regulative institution
where everything is prescribed and most things are proscribed, where routine is the
order of the day and the order of the day is routine, then spontaneity is a hugely
transgressive act. Put aside criticality about whether spontaneity, being in the now, is
possible. The basic clownesque practices I have described here gave the prisoners,
and students and Annie and I a means to challenge the practices of the prison, not
through explicit protest but through slipping momentarily out of the chains of cause
and effect, of time, of the planned, through dissent. The unplanned and playful
becomes a political tool, and bridges the gap between the phenomenology of the
Lecoq clown and the more explicitly political clown, such as Dario Fo. Ubu the King
holds two fingers up to authority, excellent, but improvisation which is scarcely
noticed but nevertheless sensed, does so too. I may be accused of an idealised notion
of the freedom and of the power of the clown, and it is true that the stability of the
institution will reassert itself, if it ever felt the breath of challenge, but at bottom the
role of the clown at HMP West Hill was messing about. Frost and Yarrow’s assertion
about clown play is apposite:
The clown plays. The clown plays the realities of what and where and with
whom he finds himself to be. He cannot know those realities in advance, for
so much of it depends upon us, the audience, that it cannot be pre-planned.
Everything is new to the clown. (1990: 68/9; Frost and Yarrow’s italics).
7
No wonder those in whom power has vested authority, for example, prison officers,
feel threatened by the spontaneous. Oh yes, they may laugh and pretend to enjoy the
project, there are studies and papers on the value of laughter, including this one, but
you know that deep down they, and I really don’t need to tell you who they are, feel
deeply threatened. Ultimately it’s because in Steve Linsers’s words ‘A clown is a poet
who is also an orang-utan’ (quoted in Towsen 1976: no page number).
Richard Cuming, 16th November 2009
8