According to the Department of Correctional Services, in January this year there were 165 840 people in prison and estimates are that up to three times this number of South Africans pass through the prison system each year. These great universities of crime are self-perpetuating. The result is the virtual normalisation of criminality as reflected in Loukmaan Adams’s and Boebie Hamza’s Prison Codes.
Set in Pollsmoor, a gentle, avuncular warden (Faruq Valley Omar) narrates the story of inmate Davie (Craig Dullisear), a mummy’s boy who transforms into a prison gang leader and murderer. On the one hand, a strength of this work is the empathy with which the characters are shown and the ordinariness with which the terrible situation they find themselves in is related. On the other hand, the script is too slight and underdeveloped to offer much insight, and its treatment of events as banal leaves us emotionally uninvolved. Nor is there sympathy for the major victim – Davie’s wife (Bronwyn Reddie), while a woman’s rapist assailants are portrayed as naughty youngsters.
The script needs serious attention for elementary failings. Almost every sentence from the narrator starts with “so” and events we have just witnessed are often tiresomely re-related.
Billed as a “play with music”, there is far too much musical interlude for a work that isn’t a musical. The dialogue is all character bluff, while the songs don’t move the action along but attempt to express the inner life of the characters. Unfortunately, the music is repetitively formulaic, trite and sentimental. One of many tautological refrains will illustrate – “I’m cold and alone on my own”. You get the idea.
Yet there is a tremendous synergy between a spirited cast and a particularly (on the night I attended) chirpy audience all too familiar with gangster youths.
