When overcrowding forces two very different women to share a prison cell, neither is particularly pleased to discover she has a new roommate.
Marj has already served ten years of a life sentence for the murder of her abusive husband. Tough, funny and fiercely independent, she has learned how to survive prison — and how to survive herself. She knows every rule, every shortcut and every kind of prison bullshit. More importantly, after a decade behind bars, she has begun to wonder who she will be if she ever gets out.
Veronica, middle class, articulate and accustomed to a very different kind of life, has arrived in prison after being convicted of mortgage fraud. She is appalled by the indignities of prison life and initially convinced that she simply doesn’t belong there. Marj finds her pretentious. Veronica finds Marj impossible.
Thrown together by circumstances neither has chosen, the two women slowly begin to dismantle each other’s assumptions. Their arguments, unlikely companionship and increasingly intimate conversations reveal two women at very different stages of their lives — one who has spent years adapting to confinement, and one desperately trying not to.
As their relationship deepens, the cell becomes a strange little world of its own: sometimes funny, sometimes brutal, occasionally tender. Secrets emerge, loyalties shift, and both women are forced to confront uncomfortable truths about who they were, who they have become and what freedom might actually mean.
Cellular is a serious, darkly comic two-hander about friendship, identity, class and the unexpected intimacy of being trapped with a stranger — a story in which the real sentence is not necessarily the one handed down by a court.
Written & Directed by Dean Stalham
Starring Jane Gull & Vanessa Koster-Goodliffe
Ticket Information
Performance Dates: Monday 2nd & Tuesday 3rd November
Performance Time: 7.30pm
Run Time: 60 mins
Tickets: £16 (includes booking fee)