by Rebecca Abrams
Growing up in the 1960s and 70s in what would these days be called a ‘blended family’, I was by turns the youngest child, eldest child and middle child in a complex, ever-evolving tangle of parents and siblings. Perhaps this explains why, as a writer, I’ve always been so interested in family dynamics and family conflict. Visible or not, these themes run like stubborn threads through nearly all my writing, even in works that superficially have little in common.
Over two thousand years ago, Sophocles put the same themes centre stage (quite literally) in his scorching family tragedy, Electra, which I first encountered as an undergraduate and have been captivated by ever since. I’d wanted for some time to revision the play into a contemporary drama, but couldn’t find a creatively satisfying way to do so. In 2018, during a playwriting course with theatre director John Retallack, the solution arrived.
Tinkering around one day with an exercise on voice and monologue, I found myself writing about a young woman coming to the end of a custodial prison sentence and fantasising about how her life will pan out after her release. The character took root in my imagination, and over the next few weeks was joined by a frightened mother, an abandoned brother and a dead father. Three quarters of the way through writing the first draft, I suddenly realised who they were.
Like its Ancient Greek template, All of Us anatomises the tragic consequences of engrained cycles of domestic violence and toxic familial dynamics, and revolves around a mother-son-daughter triad. But in place of the traditional Greek chorus standing on the sidelines, passively commenting on the action, there is now a restorative justice facilitator who actively offers the other characters a chance to divert fate, not blindly repeat it.
I’d got to know a bit about Restorative Justice thanks to to a close friend, Angie Kaye, a documentary film-maker turned restorative justice facilitator.
Over our many walks and cups of coffee, she’d explained how a facilitated meeting works and the painstaking process that precedes it. Through our conversations, I came to understand that much of the vital work of restorative justice takes place before the formal face-to-face meetings, in the silences, in the gaps, in the moments of private reflection.
This realisation led me to the next big creative breakthrough: the decision to structure the whole play around a restorative justice meeting that the audience never actually sees. As in real life, the play’s action is the process; the outcome resides in an unknowable zone of possibility.
But how do you go about loosening the iron fist of anger, pain, grievance and vengefulness? How do you get people to the point where they are willing to sit in a room and talk to the very person who has shattered their life and hurt them so deeply? Listening to facilitators, victims and ex-offenders speaking about their experiences at The Mint House helped to deepen my understanding, as did visiting HMP High Down, a medium security prison, to sit in on the final session of a Sycamore Programme and talk to a group of current offenders.
One of them told me: “They lock you up and they lock you in and they lock you away, you and everything you did. They don’t do anything with it. They just lock it all up.” A damning and accurate summary of the criminal justice system in 21st century Britain.
Unlocking is central to what restorative justice does: loosening the knots that bind us to a certain way of thinking or feeling. It is slow and delicate work and it takes place not only between people, but within them. In physical and temporal spaces, and also in invisible psychological spaces.
In All of Us I wanted to enact all these different kinds of space. To show the characters’ physical encounters, yes, but also the meetings that only ever take place in their minds and hearts, consciously and unconsciously. I wanted to explore the shifting spaces between and within them, the spaces where they can, hopefully, begin to encounter other ways of thinking and feeling about the past, to loosen its hold on their lives.
Conflict is the pulsating heart of all compelling stories in life as in art. We all understand and recognise the human capacity for conflict, the devastating power it can have over us. Restorative justice, when it succeeds, does something truly remarkable and infinitely precious. It helps people to move beyond the conflict deadlock and break the cycle of violence. It enables them to consider events from other perspectives, to meet those they’ve hurt and been hurt by, and see them in a new light. More than that, it enables them to see themselves in new ways, to encounter different versions of themselves.
Above all else, this is what I wanted to explore in the play, because locking out the possibility of meeting ourselves and others, with all our mistakes and flaws, our shame and guilt, our capacity for compassion and change, ultimately makes prisoners of us all.
Rebecca Abrams is an author, playwright, and journalist based in Oxford. She is the author of eight works of fiction and non-fiction, three stage plays, and a verse play, The Pied Piper of Covid (2020). Her debut novel, Touching Distance (2009), was shortlisted for a McKitterick Prize for Literature and won the MJA Open Book Award for Medical Fiction. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, is a former Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford and a Gladstone’s Library Writer-in-Residence.
We are hosting a special film screening of ALL OF US at The Old Fire Station on Saturday the 27th of July 2024. More information and tickets can be found here: