Our prison culture is more barbaric than it was in 1823: Elizabeth Fry ‘The Angel of Prisons’ reviewed

The Angel of Prisons dramatises the life of the penal reformer Elizabeth Fry, who lived near Canning Town. She married a wealthy Quaker, Joseph Fry, who encouraged her philanthropic work which she managed to pursue while raising 12 children. Early in life, Fry had been a party girl who loved dancing, and this production shows her practising her moves to a soundtrack of thumping contemporary music. The script, by James Kenworth, blends present-day London vernacular with the dialect of the early 19th century. It’s easy to watch and it delivers heaps of information without any hint of lecture-hall formality.

When Fry visited the mixed-gender Newgate Prison near the Old Bailey she found her vocation. In those days, lawlessness was considered a heritable quality and the prison system was treated as a landfill site where criminals could be dumped for good. The lice-ridden cells were full of drunken women holding sickly babies fathered by the male convicts. Affluent visitors bought tickets to gawp at these infernal surroundings. But at least the female convicts had escaped with their lives. Execution was considered an enlightened means of protecting the public from crime by expunging polluted genes. We hear from a high court judge – evidently a thoughtful and educated man – who sums up the social advantages of the gallows. ‘I prefer to hang,’ he says, as if speaking of an obvious and universal good. There were more than 200 offences that attracted the death penalty, including the theft of food and ‘keeping the company of gypsies for a month’. This strange law imperilled gypsies themselves by making them potential witnesses to a capital offence. They were apt to be murdered by anyone who feared arrest for ‘keeping company’ with them.