A recent OECD report has contradicted the common wisdom that the children of single-parent families go on to do badly in life. However, a high proportion of male inmates have had absent, inadequate or brutal fathers. And it obviously follows that those men are likely to have difficulties when they themselves become parents. A stone is thrown into the water and a malign ripple swamps successive generations.
That’s clearly the thinking behind the National Youth Theatre’s latest offering. That excellent dramatist Philip Osment went into Rochester Young Offender Institution with his director, Jim Pope, and a group of young performers. They talked to inmates who already are or soon will be fathers themselves and, after workshops elsewhere, they’ve come up with a piece that, despite the occasional vocal mumble and a somewhat melodramatic twist at the end, convinces you that a serious social problem is being presented verbatim.
An earnest young drama teacher, Simon Morgan’s Tim, is preparing a class of young fathers or expectant fathers for an improvised play about their predicament. There are factions, tensions and even the odd fight within the group, which contains more ethnic-minority prisoners than I suspect the NYT team found in north Kent. Segun Olaiya’s chunky Brownie is a particularly tough, disruptive presence, respected despite his friendship with a strange boy who quotes Marcus Aurelius and is suspected by the others of being a paedophile — but then he’s the illiterate son of a burglar who, if we’re to trust one of several lines too casually dropped into the mix, ended up hanging himself.
But what mainly matters isn’t a last-gasp revelation involving the so-called “nonce” that’s a bit too sympathetic to violent revenge for my liking, but the boys’ attitude to their nearest and supposedly dearest. They imagine giving advice to their children, one movingly vowing to give his son the self-esteem he never had. They also write mostly hostile letters to their mostly rejecting fathers, one ironically thanking the old man for the days he and his siblings had to get their own dinners because their mother was desperately earning pennies as a cleaner. “Dear scumbag,” begins a curt, obscene denunciation, provoking a slightly comical “Fair enough, there’s a lot of anger that needs expressing” from the teacher.
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And the results? One improvised episode in which a returning inmate is turned away by his mother, another simply consisting of “Son, son”, “Dad, dad” and a forgiving hug. There’s hopelessness but also hope — and, for the rest of us, a lesson worth hearing.
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