In their shoes: participation, social change and empathy in Open Clasp's Key Change

Kay Hepplewhite As the audience settles for a performance of Key Change, we are presented with a stage, bare except for a woman in a grey tracksuit, sitting at the side, playing pop tunes on a CD player and reading a magazine. Gradually four other women, also in the uniform tracksuits, join her. They hang out and chat. There is a physical closeness between them: they are at leisure but not at home. Lining up with their backs to the audience, they ask each other ‘Ready? ’ and the play springs into action. The actors speak in strong north-east of England regional accents, addressing the audience directly with physicalized narrative. We are invited over the walls and, for the next sixty minutes, our ‘inside’ guides introduce us to the hilarity, tender sensitivity and stark reality of their life in prison. The actors use rolls of masking tape to mark out...