“You Are against UK Law”: Clean Break Theatre Company’s Carceral Dramaturgy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
London’s Clean Break Theatre Company was founded in 1979 by two incarcerated women as an issue-based company devoted to “touring plays that revealed the struggles faced by women in prison” (“Our Story”). Over the past forty-five years, Clean Break has expanded the scope of its dramatic inquiry to focus not exclusively on women’s incarceration but also more broadly on women’s enmeshment in the carceral state. I argue that two Clean Break commissions translate the hard-to-conceptualize relationship between prison and the larger carceral state into a theatrical idiom that audiences can see, sense, and feel. In these plays – Winsome Pinnock’s Mules (1996) and Lucy Kirkwood’s it felt empty when the heart went at first but it is alright now (2009) – I discover four specific, shared dramaturgical strategies. These elements, which I term carceral dramaturgy, cooperate to stage the dramatic protagonists as trapped within a punitive network of sites and policies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".