Calypso Productions
South Great George's St.
Dublin 2, Ireland
T (353 1) 6704539
F (353 1) 6704275
calypso@tinet.ie

Production 1999

In 998 , Calypso Productions commissioned Paula Meehan to write a play about imprisonment in Ireland. The result was Cell a powerful production - a taut, tense and cruelly comic exposé of life and death on the inside. This project was initiated to focus, through a theatrical production and accompanying education programme (written by Dr Ian O'Donnell, director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust), on human rights and social justice in relation to the Irish Penal System.

Believing that crime must be seen in a social context, we at Calypso felt there was a need to ask what prisons do, for the prisoner and for society, and to examine the actual effects and current realities of prison.

Paula Meehan was born and lives in Dublin. One of Ireland's leading poets, she has published four collections of poetry to date, has written two plays for children and one for adults. Throughout the eighties and early part of the nineties, she ran writing workshops in many of the state's prisons - Portlaoise, Arbour Hill, Mountjoy, Shelton Abbey - but most frequently with women prisoners in Mountjoy. Her extraordinary play offers an intimate "insider's" invitation into an ambivalent, dramatic and surprisingly humorous world. She says of her motivation in writing Cell:

"... the feeling remains of unfinished business. This play would be my way of acquitting my huge debt to the women I've worked with over the years; and might act as a channel of the anger and frustration I've felt in the course of working with women prisoners. Of the twelve, mostly young, women who attended the first workshop back in the mid-eighties, I've ascertained that only one is still alive. Most died of Aids related illnesses, some overdosed, one killed herself. The toll amounts each passing year and I am more used to hearing of the funerals of these women, than I am of them surviving and building lives outside. Few of the women I worked with I would describe as criminal. Most were victims of social forces, of the same class background as myself. For many, the outside world was as much a prison as Mountjoy. For some, being locked up was a respite."

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