JAILHOUSE OPERA

A WARM, functional auditorium. The throbbing Latin American rhythms of West Side Story. A break in rehearsal. Someone, unasked, hands us good tea in a paper cup. The cast relaxes, chatting easily. It could be a rehearsal scene from anywhere in the world apart from the uniformed guards front and back, and the odd squawk from a radio. The six men gathered around are animated, curious to know what the visitors think.

No problem there. Three weeks into rehearsal, the show is funny, sexy, moving, menacing. It crackles with energy between the 60 of them, the men and women on stage generate enough of it to launch a rocket. The aggressive, macho posturing so vital to the story line is woefully realistic. So are the gang fight scenes, apparent free for alls incorporating head butting, head banging body throwing, kicking - but all, crucially, conducted in time to the complex, insistent rhythms pounding from the piano. The love scenes are sweet and poignant. When Tony launches into a virtuoso performance of Maria, there is a deep, respectful silence crowned with applause at the end. It's a hit. Every man and woman acts and behaves as though their lives depended on it how could it be otherwise?

So, that's the show. That said, what else are we to talk about? Whether there's much theatre work going at the moment? If there's a good pub close by where we might have a drink afterwards? What are you in for?

Well, the first two questions are out because these men are going nowhere - either tonight or next year or even in the next five to 10 years. The third question is more easily answered - they are in for armed robbery mostly, involving several banks, the FAI, a race course, a post office and who knows what else. Most of them have been in and out of detention centres and jails since their early teens. Most of them wouldn't be here if they had never had a taste of heroin.

And, though it may not be a fashionable thing to say, most of them clearly never had a chance to begin with. They get by on black humour, make light of the sentences for the visitor: "Sure at this rate, we'll all be Laurence Oliviers by the time we get out!" Hard to believe that behind these open, vulnerable faces are men and women who have wrecked people's lives and left traumatised victims in their wake.

Out on the rehearsal floor a big fair haired cast member agrees to have his picture taken and cracks wryly: "Oh great - I'll have some bloody aul' wan lookin' at this in the paper and sayin `that's the one who stole me handbag'." Alan Morgan, John O'Hanlon and Joe Morrisson are in their 30s. Anthony is 27. Patrick Brazil is just 20, with big, clear eyes and the uncomplicated expression of a child. He remembers acting in "bleedin' Cinderella" in St Joseph's Special School in Clonmel when he was 10 or 12. But this is something new. Suddenly, he blurts out: "I'm goin' straight when I get out." Excuse me? "Yeah, I'm goin' straight. I'm turned around - it's like I'm findin' out there's other things I can do, it's like . . . there's somethin' else out there."

The older lads shift a bit uncomfortably in their chairs and mutter things like "speak for yourself". But, for those few awkward moments, the laughter is not so raucous and the bluster even less convincing. Later - alone - others will also say something similar. Sure, it might be just an act. But who will be the first to write them off? Can anyone know for sure what triggers epiphanies in people's lives? Noisy, out dated and savagely overcrowded Mountjoy jail might not seem an obvious place to go looking for Damascene conversions. But right now, behind the high stone walls and unyielding face of the great wooden entrance doors off the North Circular Road, it might just might be the most obvious place in the world. Bars, wire claustrophobic, cave like cells, the relentless grating of keys turning in locks, of gates clanging shut ... the unshakeable impression is of the gates of hell, clanging shut on life, on hope, on spontaneity, on colour, on high spirits, or variety of any kind. But in these past few weeks, behind the gates and locked doors, past the gangs of prison guards, somewhere in the bowels of this miserable Victorian edifice, Mountjoy's little theatre has been jumping with the exuberance of creativity, raw energy, talent and self discovery.

FOR Patrick Brazil and 39 of his fellow inmates (including about a dozen from the women's prison), the dynamic arrival of Pimlico Opera in the prison has not only added a new dimension to their lives; it is their lives. Every day for the past few weeks, the brain numbing routine of prison life has been replaced with the colour, energy and thorough going professional standards demanded of them by Wasfi Kani, Pimlico's producer/director and the seven highly accomplished young Pimlico company members who take key roles in the production. The show costs £50,000 to produce and travelled to Dublin thanks mainly to the generosity of a London based donor with a Dublin office who specifically requested that Pimlico stage a show in an Irish prison. Smaller donations have also come from British and Irish Arts Councils and the American Ireland Fund.

Punctuality, team work, discipline and commitment are just the basic requirements from the cast. And Kani is no pushover; break the rules and you're out. At least one woman has found this to be no bluff.

The rules include a commitment to keep drugs out of the theatre and - as 27 year old Gwen Griffin from the women's prison put it, tapping her head - to "keep your sexual fantasies up here". These are women whose only interaction with men is talking out the windows at night to the inmates in St Patrick's or holding conversations up through the heating pipes to prisoners above. But in spite of the throbbing Latin American rhythms of West Side Story and the sassy, sensuous dance scenes, none of them seems interested in embarking on her own north side story with a lad from the men's side. The way these women see it, there is too much at stake.

Tracey Hynes is a lovely, open faced, 20 year old who has been a drug addict since her early teens. She still carries an air of bewilderment at the twist of fate that has her serving three years for "going for a drive" with a man who stopped off to fire shots into the home of a garda. But like all the others, the light returns to her eyes at a mention of the show: "I found talents I didn't know I had. I didn't know I could dance or sing, ... And the show is a break from doing the same thing every day and that's great - especially if you're on drugs. It keeps you from thinking of them."

With the encouragement of an enlightened governor, John Lonergan, many of the women have found practical, life enhancing ways to fight the boredom. Emma developed an interest in fitness and now takes half a dozen regular devotees through fast complex, perfectly choreographed "step" aerobics classes. Some get involved in pottery or sewing classes. Deborah plays Gaelic football. Several of them are studying for Leaving Cert subjects. But Karen feels the need for more variety and greater challenge: "Trouble comes from boredom. If there were more things to do . . . like more subjects for the Leaving Cert. We're supposed to be doing history, philosophy. But we had no school last week because of the holidays and if you're constantly around each other there's tension." This is where Wasfi and her team have performed their miracles.

Jamiee is only 19, thoughtful and articulate beyond her years: "The show has given me a chance. I've been in for a year and I've been thinking lately that `I am as bad as everyone thinks I am' . . . But I've been finding out there are things I can do. And Wasfi and the team . .. they treat us like human beings. It's eased my sentence a bit."

DEPRESSION - severe enough to warrant hospital treatment - is the riding problem on the women's side. Ask them what troubles them most about prison life and a sense of profound loss, replaces the banter as the mothers' among them describe the trauma of being separated from their children. Gwen, a bright, 27 year old Dubliner, explains herself to her little brood when they come to visit, by telling them that she is "working here - helping the big policemen and women".

Prison itself, says Jacqueline Reilly, currently serving three months, is not as tough as she expected. "But," she says meaningfully, firmly, "this is my first and last time." The loss of freedom, the absence of her child, are too much to bear. But for these horrific few months, Wasfi and her company have brought meaning, self respect and hope to people with none of these.

It would be hard to over state what this show means to its cast of inmates. Back in the men's prison, Alan Morgan recalls that he was 14 when he started on heroin and since then, has been in and out of Lusk, St Patrick's, Mountjoy. "But this show - we've had a natural high. No, there was never a high like heroin," he says simply, "until this..."

John O'Hanlon "came from a family programmed to explode every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I was the referee and I discovered when I was about eight that one way to solve it was to go ballistic." The signs are still there; he plays Action in the show and there was surely never more appropriate casting. He is 31 now, a heroin addict who has had only one full year "out" of detention or jail since the age of 16. His best friend died of AIDS in March.

Jason Loftus is a gentle, diffident 28 year old who talks wistfully of his three small children and his life on heroin since the age of 16. But he has five years left to serve for a hopelessly bungled armed raid on a local post office. This show has transformed prison life for him: "I haven't hardly thought about drugs since I got into this, I'm feeling great and getting great encouragement from the family."

The predestination that marks babies from birth and which Governor John Lonergan talks about so eloquently is evident even within the show. Terry Brazil, Patrick's father, is also in the cast, a thoughtful 41 year old with more than six years to serve of a seven year sentence for more drug related crime. Like his son, he has discovered a creativity within himself that has surprised him: "I'll be up for review in Christmas 99. It'd be nice to get out and maybe get into an acting workshop. For now, I'd just like everyone to be working here - doing something, anything..."

Can it be real? Can "hard" men be turned around? Wasfi Kani reserves judgment. Her motive is simple. She grew up behind Wormwood Scrubs prison and knew, "always knew, that I could be one of those people in there". Her drive to bring opera into prisons, to maintain professional standards by bringing in professional actors and singers and to demand nothing less from the inmates, has attracted enormous attention in England - especially when she introduced Sweeney Todd (involving a serial killer) to the prisons repertoire.

The most important element, she believes, is getting the public in to see the shows. "I asked an Irish friend of mine - a highly educated woman - how many people she reckoned were in prison in Ireland. She guessed 100,000. In fact, the real figure is around 2,000. A lot of what I do is about getting the public into the prisons, to get them to take a closer look, and make them think about prison in a positive context - that you can't just lock prisoners away and humiliate them for three years, that if they want to please me and the choreographer for three weeks, it's possible that they will want to please society."

It's a tough vocation. "Yes, we have problems unique to prison, shows. Most of the cast is locked up every night. We use a rubber gun and rubbers knives as very realistic looking props but have to keep them permanently locked up. If someone doesn't turn up, it's not because they have a cold - it could be because they've been released, gone to court, gone down the "block". I arrived in last Friday to be told that Baby John - one of my stars - had been transferred to Portlaoise Prison. We got him back by the end of the day thanks to some very helpful senior officers . .

And what happens when it's over and the caravan moves on? The prisoners talk almost fearfully of that day. Stephen Langridge, an opera director currently working with Pimlico, sees it as anything but a wasted exercise: "Yes, I do believe that for some of them, the intention is to go straight afterwards. I believe the intention is there, if the mechanism is there. But apart from that, they will have had a month of working with discipline, creative teamwork - that surely has less to do with whether or not there will be a next show and more to do with life and opportunities that go way beyond theatre.