Clean Break

Dream Pill

Clean Break presents Rebecca Prichard’s remarkable play Dream Pill, following its hugely successful runs at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Soho Theatre.

Dream Pill introduces its audience at close quarters to Tunde and Bola, two nine-year old girls sex-trafficked to a UK city. In a claustrophobic basement, they share their child’s eye view of the journey they have taken, the people they have encountered, and the objects they have collected. With a naivety, imagination and humour that have survived so far against all odds, they draw in the audience with their childlike fantasies, innocent superstitions and unanswerable questions.

Dream Pill was originally staged at Soho Theatre in November 2010 as part of Clean Break’s universally acclaimed production Charged¸ created by six of the most exciting and distinctive female voices in British theatre. It has since been presented at the Underbelly during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011, on tour in Scotland in March 2012, and for professionals at Scotland Yard and in the criminal justice system. In summer 2012 Clean Break returns to the Latitude Festival with Dream Pill before touring to the Greenbelt Festival in August.

About Clean Break

Celebrated women’s theatre company Clean Break uses theatre for personal and political change and works with women affected by the criminal justice system. It produces plays by female playwrights at leading new writing theatres and delivers a drama-based education programme from its North London studios and in women’s prisons. Recent productions include Rebecca Prichard’s Dream Pill (Edinburgh Festival, Latitude and touring), Sam Holcroft’s Dancing Bears and Chloë Moss’s Fatal Light (Latitude), Charged, written by six of the UK’s foremost contemporary playwrights (Soho Theatre), and it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now by Lucy Kirkwood (Arcola Theatre).

Clean Break is a theatre company with an independent education programme. Both strands of our work are rooted in the belief that theatre changes lives.

Clean Break was set up in 1979 by two women prisoners who believed that theatre could bring the hidden stories of imprisoned women to a wider audience. Still the only women’s theatre company of its kind today, Clean Break has remained true to these roots, continuing to inspire playwrights around the complex theme of women and crime – enlightening and entertaining audiences. Integral to this, is the company’s long-established theatre-based education and training programme enabling women offenders and those at risk of offending to develop personal, social, professional and creative skills leading to education and employment.

Behind the scenes, we provide high-quality theatre-based courses, qualifications, training opportunities and specialist support which are critical for the rehabilitation of women offenders in prisons and the community. On the stage, we produce ground-breaking and award-winning plays which dramatise women’s experience of, and relationship to, crime and punishment. Our women-only identity is crucial to our history and rationale, and provides us with the most effective model for representing, understanding and meeting the complex needs of women who offend.