BECKETT IN BRIXTON
When a frail, 87-year-old woman was found bludgeoned to death in her Victorian house in Sussex police were baffled. There was no sign of a forced entry, struggle, or murder weapon, and the assailant seemed destined to get away with it. But then investigators called in a real-life 'Cracker',
a top offender profiler by the name of Julian Boon
For Oxford Film & TV
Words by Stephen Cook
Independent on Saturday Magazine, March 2001
©Henrietta Butler 2025
Penikese Island School: an Alcatraz for young offenders,
or a pioneering US venture in rehabilitation?
Independent on Saturday Magazine 1999
THE REAL CRACKER
SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION
CASTAWAYS
In September 1999, the National Theatre went into HMP Brixton to create a drama project in collaboration with some of the prisoners. NT Director Stephen Powell selected extracts from Samuel Beckett plays, and four National Theatre actors and two NT technicians worked alongside sixteen Brixton inmates. The repertoire was performed to the public over one week in the Cage—an acre-sized cage constructed for IRA inmates to exercise in, which they used until one day a helicopter freed several of them. The Cage too became a space of joy and renewal, transformed from its cold history
The project raised £15,000
for Macmillan Cancer Relief
and cast a brief ray of sunshine
into the lives of convicts
The Guardian September 1999
Stagewrite Spring 2000