Less of a theatre piece and more of an art project, this worthy yet insufficiently accessible production adopts a 1980s format, using the record player as a device to channel and project forgotten material into the present.

The origins of the piece, directed by The Wooster Group’s Kate Valk, was a record made by folklorist Bruce Jackson, who travelled down to a Texas prison in the 1960s and recorded songs of the Black Americans incarcerated inside. The record played appears all the more authentic for the background noises: the coughs, the laughter; found sounds now inherited by the podcast format.

Three performers: Eric Berryman, Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore accompany these voices from the past, their modern bodies providing a connection that aims to bring the historical figures to life. The contemporary relevance is clear, as Berryman explains, enormous numbers of Black Americans are imprisoned in the US, but it is just how long they have been there, vastly over-representative in the US penal system, that shocks. “I learned that after American slavery the system was redesigned to figure out how to get those bodies back working for it, and so [since the] 1860s and 1870s … that is how long they have been there”. 

The songs played have different meanings and purposes, they can be expressions of feelings personal and communal, better shared in song: love or grief (such as one here responding to the assassination of JFK in 1963). Or they can be critiques too dangerous to put spoken words to, “there are things one can sing that one is not allowed to say, even in current society”, says Berryman. Additionally, the songs can be purely functional, such as work songs, essential to pass or keep time. And sometimes, they were spiritual songs just to keep the faith. “Many of these prisoners were wrongly imprisoned, some for decades…”

The piece, acclaimed when performed in the US in 2019, is placed here in a less intimate more conventional theatre setting, squeezing in more audience, but compromising the immersive qualities. And surely English subtitles would have been appropriate, too; Berryman acknowledges in the production his own difficultly understanding the songs, which contain ‘codes’ to conceal their meaning from the prison guards.

The question of how to recuperate a past obscured by dominant narratives is raised. “There is no wrong or right way to receive the record” says Berryman, “if you want to try to pay more attention to the lyrical content of the songs, or if you just want to feel the rhythm…”. However, most of us would have appreciated the choice. Without more context to the songs and to their significance, within the performance itself, their true resonance is compromised.