Pearl Mackie on her prison play: ‘Baby is the story of many women in the criminal justice system’

“It’s quite intense rehearsing a one-woman show.”

Pearl Mackie is taking a short break from rehearsals for Baby when she hops on a video call with Big Issue. The new play is running at Brixton House throughout October. There are no other actors with Mackie, but she could not be more thrilled to be working with writer Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and director Milli Bhatia. Because this play, this production, this place all really mean something.

“The play is in association with Clean Break, who work with women who have been part of the criminal justice system. And that happens to Baby in the play,” says Mackie, who first came to our attention as Bill Potts, starring alongside Peter Capaldi in one of the most consistently brilliant seasons of Doctor Who.

“She is convicted of a crime, goes to prison, and ends up having a child in prison.”

It’s a daunting prospect, an entirely solo performance, taking on multiple characters as well as the title role. But Mackie has form for powerful theatre. The last time Big Issue saw her on stage was in Grenfell: in the Words of Survivors – a verbatim play, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and Anthony Simpson-Pike, created by Gillian Slovo from interviews with residents at the heart of the Grenfell Tower tragedy – survivor accounts alongside testimony from the public inquiry in a devastating, powerful production at the National Theatre.

Now Mackie is bringing her skills home to Brixton, where she grew up.

“Baby is a really fascinating character,” continues Mackie. “There’s so much that she has come up against in life – a lot of trauma in her childhood, in her upbringing, but she keeps trying to move forward.

“When we meet her, she has a real desire and urgency to tell the audience her story from beginning to end. Because she’s been faced with so many people – solicitors, barristers, probation workers, support workers who just spend an hour with her and don’t hear or listen to the whole story.

“So she starts, like, ‘I need to tell you this story. I need to tell you everything. So you can actually help me, so you can vouch for me, so you can be my allies…’

“That kind of recruiting is such an interesting position to play. There are horrendous things she’s had to face. And telling the story is a struggle for her. She doesn’t anticipate how much of an emotional toll it will take. As she’s telling the story, she is going through it, back in that world.

“But I think she’s incredible. There’s something really powerful and universal in her honesty and her struggle. One of the things that really drew me to the play was that Baby could be any of us.”

The play came about when writer Bhatti delivered workshops in a prison that had a mother and baby unit. Seeing babies in prams wheeled out by prison staff rather than their own mothers shocked her into creating Baby.

“It is a story based on the life experience of many, many women in the criminal justice system,” says Mackie.

“There are so many instances of trauma, domestic violence and poverty in their past. The statistics are insane. I think 70% of women in prison report experiencing domestic abuse and so many are in for survival crimes.

“So many things led them into the system.”

Read more:

• ‘When I first went inside I wanted to die’: What life’s like inside a UK women’s prison
• New Holloway Prison site will have homes for women leaving the justice system
• Women are being sent to prison in UK for self-defence or being coerced: ‘I lost everything’

Mackie has been doing her reading. And meeting women in the criminal justice system. The statistics and injustices she has uncovered have shocked her; the women she has encountered have inspired her.

“I thought I was quite switched on and aware of injustices in the world,” she says.

“But I’ve really had to educate myself for this. And it’s so enraging. I find it baffling these statistics are not more widely known.

“Women who give birth in prison are nine times more likely to have a stillbirth. But of course, because the prison system isn’t designed to make people feel comfortable and supported.”

The collaboration with Clean Break is ongoing and meaningful. Mackie has been attending sessions with them at HMP Downview in Surrey.

“What Clean Break do is incredible,” she says. “I have been a supporter of their work for a long time. Their members have all been in the criminal justice system, and it’s a community that women can be part of, that helps them if they want to do anything with the arts, gives them the tools. And it gives them support – which is one of the key themes in this play. Because Baby just doesn’t have any support. That’s really common, and it’s hard to move forward when you’re constantly being told all these avenues aren’t open to you.

“Clean Break listen to women who have that lived experience. That speaks to me on an activist level. These stories need to be told.

“We did a workshop in Downview and there were six women there. We started by creating a contract of how we would like to work respectfully with everyone in the room, then I read an excerpt from Baby. And I was astonished by how much of the play they got from just the first page.

“I feel like they all recognised similarities in their own experience. I was like, Are you sure you haven’t read the whole play? Because everything you’re saying basically happens.

“Then they all wrote letters to Baby. I’m going to put them up in my dressing room. Their words were so profound and so full of love and optimism. That is one thing I really noticed amongst this group of women. There was such support and a sense of community and appreciation for each other.

“I found the same thing when I met members of an incredible charity called Birth Companions, who had experience of having children in prison and being separated from their children.

“Art has always been used to shed light on injustice or give voice to people who aren’t heard. That’s how we tell our stories. That’s how we get people to understand situations they might not experience on a day-to-day basis. And for me, that’s what art should do. It should create change, it should provoke thought and it should challenge people to understand an existence that’s different to their own.” 

Baby is on at Brixton House until 31 October.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

Change a vendor’s life.

Buy from your local Big Issue vendor every week – and always take the magazine. It’s how vendors earn with dignity and move forward.

You can also support online:
Subscribe to the magazine or support our work with a monthly gift. Your support helps vendors earn, learn and thrive while strengthening our frontline services.

Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.