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.