The attraction of prison, as a setting for a TV drama, is obvious. It allows viewers to reflect on the nature of good and evil, realise a sympathy for perpetrators as well as victims, and extend forgiveness, experiencing the pleasure of mercy without its concomitant distress. It is, in short, a perfect moral petri dish, not unlike the cultures examined under the microscope of philosophers like René Descartes, John Locke and Plato. All of this collides in BBC One’s new six-part drama from Dennis Kelly, Waiting for the Out.
Dan (Josh Finan) is a sensitive academic who has begun teaching a beginner class in philosophy at a British prison. With his assembled convicts, he discusses the nature of being, but it is clear that Dan, himself, is searching for something. At home, he’s struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder, which manifests in lengthy checks of his gas hob. At work, the prisoners begin to chip away at repressed memories of his father – himself, an abusive former prisoner – and elder brother Lee (Stephen Wight), who is in recovery from his own addiction issues. “Every generation gets its chance to change,” Lee tells Dan. “Me and you, we’re ours.” But can Dan ever fully escape the psychological confines of his upbringing?
His Majesty’s prisons carry a certain weight in British telly. From the hard knocks of Bad Girls to the gritty realism of Jimmy McGovern’s Time, the focus has been on the toughness of life while incarcerated. But in recent years there have been some projects that buck this trend: the 2012 documentary, Caesar Must Die, about a prison production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, which showed a micro-society of writing, business, theatre and education groups; and the Oscar-nominated Sing Sing, which starred Colman Domingo and a cast of actors from a real rehabilitation-through-drama programme. In this same way, Waiting for the Out adds some colour to its austere backdrop. Prisoners debate the problem of Odysseus and the sirens, their experiences of feminism, and whether Slavoj Žižek is “the Billy Connolly of philosophers”.
It’s an interesting idea, and, adapted from Andy West’s 2021 memoir The Life Inside, has the ring of truth. The central questions of philosophy bleed into the corridors of the prison, which is populated by men who are trapped in their own existential limbo. “I’m just biding my time, waiting for the out,” Dris (Francis Lovehall) tells Dan. Later, Dan is asked to go through the time log of an inmate on suicide watch, which includes the observation that he “appeared to be alive”. When Dan is later informed that the prisoner supposedly died, he panics and asks for more details. “He didn’t kill himself, but he tried,” Dris confesses to Dan. “He’s dead, though, only a matter of time.” Throughout, the ghost of Erwin Schrödinger watches on approvingly.
These scenes in the prison are balanced against Dan’s memories of a childhood with his tinderbox, misogynistic father, played by Gerard Kearns. The baggage that Dan is carrying is clear to see. “I’m not trying to save anyone,” he explodes at a bourgeois dinner party. “The time to save them is long gone. We all missed the boat on that one, we were too busy pontificating over châteauneuf-du-pape.”
Yet the flashback sequences battle with cliché, slipping at times into a gawking, unsubtle depiction of childhood trauma. Finan is a very delicate actor, moving neatly between inscrutability and distress that’s etched across his face, yet some of these scenes feel less finessed. The depiction, too, of Dan’s OCD (what West himself calls “the executioner”; the residual voice of his father) flirts with a broadness that the complexity of the issue – Dan’s conflicted feelings about the absence of his dad – disavows.
All the same, in its slowest, most conversational moments, Kelly’s sensitive adaptation of West’s book achieves a bleak poignancy. It stares, dead on, at the fraught question of patrimony, the troubled reality of modern masculinity. “These are men,” a hallucination of Dan’s father growls at him on his first day in the joint. “These are f***ing men.” Dan, who feels he doesn’t know how to be a man, is there to instruct others in how to think about being human. The show exists at the tender intersection of these two propositions: a study on self-reflection, realisation and forgiveness.
