Alan in Belfast: Sing Sing – prison drama opens doors towards a better freedom (Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 August)

Sing Sing is a new film from Greg Kwedar which looks at the work of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) programme that works in six men’s and women’s maximum and medium security prisons in New York State.

We step inside the Sing Sing Correctional Facility to see a group of men working with an outside director (Brent played by Paul Raci). They've just completed a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream and are keen to decide their next play and begin rehearsals. It helps to know up front that while this looks like a rather slickly filmed documentary, it is instead a fictionalised representation, cowritten with alumni from the RTA programme, and starring many former inmates who take all but three of the main roles.

The RTA programme works with professional artists to help inmates create art, to write, and to perform. What started off as an opportunity for prisoners to learn practical lessons about management ahead of eventual release became a much deeper chance to find a new vocabulary to express themselves, new ways of reflecting on their own lives, past actions and future choices, and to open up with others in a usually fraught environment where vulnerability equals pain. RTA reckons that less than 3% of programme participants return to prison after they are released compared to 60% nationally.

Colman Jason Domingo portrays G, a leading figure in the Sing Sing RTA group, a playwright who batters out scripts on a typewriter in his cell, and an actor who can take on the big roles. The real G – John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield – was an early member of RTA, attended the High School for Performing Arts (you’ll know it from the TV series, musical, or film FAME). Away from the theatre, he uses his legal learning to help inmates with their parole applications. G’s closest confidante and buoyant lieutenant is Mike Mike (played by Sean San José).

The film’s initial conflict stems from the disruptive influence of Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin, a new recruit to the RTA who doesn’t wait to get his feet under the table before throwing out suggestions. Not only does Maclin suggest that a comedy would be better than producing G’s latest script, he then auditions for the role G would traditionally be cast in. While we’d expect the two alpha males to square up to each other like fighting peahens, G takes a beat, recognises his pride, gives Maclin room to flail before stepping in to gently and more robustly assist and challenge him.

Maclin is a gripping presence on screen, full of raw emotion. It’s quite a contrast – a welcome one at that – to Domingo’s equally intense but much more muted performance with slow-moving facial expressions and temperate demeanour. Domingo is allowed to linger in scenes, whereas Maclin tends to butt in or storm off. Director Brent crafts a surreal time-travelling fantasy script out of the group’s wish list that includes ancient Egypt, pirates, gladiators, Hamlet and cowboys. We see very little of the final production: that’s not the end goal of the movie. (Though snatches of camcorder footage from actual RTA performances appear towards the end of the film.)

“We’re here to become human again” is how one prisoner sums up the role of the drama. There is freedom to be found under lock and key through RTA. The inmates are expert at playing roles: on the outside before prison, inside the correction facility, externally to the other inmates, internally, and now on stage. The actors are also expert at putting themselves back into their prison days, and improvising scenes that look very authentic in the final film. Anyone who has seen a performance of the Belfast Lyric Theatre’s Blackout production in conjunction with Hydebank Wood College will have first hand experience of what is possible.

The fiction-based-on-reality aspect of Sing Sing is a troublesome distraction at times. Yet the strong performances, emotional scenes, and the sense that even the most passionate helper can need a helping hand in prison carries the film through to its conclusion. It’s a powerful reminder that rehabilitation can be a process, that change is possible, and that recidivism can be reduced.

Sing Sing is being screened in Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 30 August.