Photocopies: Prison Stories

Photocopies Prison Stories © Hannah White

Hannah White’s work is all about connection and solidarity: listening and sharing what she has heard is at the heart of what she does. Since November 2023, she has been working on adapting the writing of John Berger for a new theatre show. Based on Photocopies written in the 1990s, the audience is guided through a series of encounters. Recalled with wisdom, love and humour, they meet a pregnant teenager on a bus to Derry, a homeless woman carefully feeding a bald, sick pigeon and a group of prisoners reading.

After the first phase of development and performance of this work in progress, Hannah now wishes to deepen the scenes by talking to people who have experienced the issues portrayed in the show. In the first of a series of workshops – this spring 2025, they will be visiting the open prison on Sheppey to explore with prisoners what resonates in the writing and what more could be added as well as to listen and recreate the prisoners’ stories using movement and theatre. Later on the full company will return to the prison to perform the show after a second phase of development.

She launched a crowdfunding campaign to support workshops with prisoners to develop this new show adapted from the writing of John Berger.

Photocopies Prison Stories © Hannah White
Photocopies Prison Stories © Hannah White

JOHN BERGER

Storyteller, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, playwright, painter and critic, John Berger (1926-2017) is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years. Solo or in collaboration with Jean Mohr for example, he published more than 30 titles, the Booker Prize winning novel G and the best-seller Ways of Seeing. He has also published articles in the most important newspapers around the world.

He used to work and live in Quincy, a small French peasant community, the setting for his trilogy Into their Labours.

Painters, cineasts, writers, dancers, curators have been and are still inspired by his work, this website is a window on these TODAY creations.