Sonya Hale

Clean Break is a British theatre company set up in 1979 by two women in prison. It exists to tell the stories of women with experience of the criminal justice system and to transform women’s lives through theatre. Over 40 years, Clean Break has commissioned some of the most progressive and brilliant women writers to write ground-breaking plays, alongside developing the writing skills of the women they work with in its London studios and in prisons. This is a collection of monologues from this canon. Rebel Voices: Monologues for Women by Women celebrates the opportunities inherent when women represent themselves. Offering female performers a diverse set of monologues reflecting a range of characters in age, ethnicity and lived experience, the material is drawn from a mix of published and unpublished works. This book is for any performer who does not see themselves represented in mainstream plays, for lovers of radical women’s theatre and for rebels everywhere who believe that the act of speaking and being heard can create change.

These two plays - the winners of Synergy Theatre Project's Prison Writing Competition - tell the tense but often funny stories of drug users and the stress their habits place on their relationships. In Glory Whispers, we see Mina visited by Glory after many years away. Hopeful of seeing Glory's little boy, Mina overlooks Glory's drinking and possible drug use. But when Mina's boyfriend Jonno returns unexpectedly, the troubles and pressures of their relationships see the illusion fall away. The Monkey sees Terry on a rampage trying to reclaim the £500 his friend Alan (aka 'Thick-Al') owes him. Terry's unpredictability, the result of an accident many years before, drives the piece in dark, violent but often hilarious and unexpected ways. These plays were published to coincided with a 2017 production at Theatre503, London, by Synergy Theatre Company.