Prison Break

When it comes to women’s prisons, orange may be the new black, but for award-winning young playwright Alice Birch it’s not orange, it’s green. In 2013 she received a commission from Clean Break, an all-female campaigning theatre company which produces work about women caught up in the criminal justice system, to write a one-act play for the Almeida Festival.

She was told that it had to be set on a patch of grass. "I kept thinking about the patch of green, [it] felt very different from what we think of when we think of prison," she explains. "I thought it would be interesting to make it another world and perhaps a world that [the prisoners] had created themselves." This was the inspiration behind Little on the Inside, which is being revived for this year’s Fringe.

The continuing appeal of female-authored romance and escapist fiction is accounted for by literary theorist, Jane Spencer, by the way it gives disempowered women a fantasy of power: a chance to express their hopes and visions and to escape in imagination from the reality of oppression. I am reminded of this as I listen to Birch describe the thinking behind her play: "The idea of having an imaginative world where you can be exactly who you are, exactly who you want to be, sounds interesting and useful."

Birch is a diffident interviewee, not comfortable talking about her own work – a surprise given the confidence of her writing. Her latest piece, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again is part of the RSC’s Midsummer Mischief season, four new plays by women which respond to American academic Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s assertion that "well-behaved women don’t make history". It challenges the inbuilt sexism of our man-made language and, as Birch admits, "goes quite hard on that subject." So hard, in fact, that while The Telegraph was won over by its "provocative daring," the Financial Times accused it of "coming close to outright misandry."

Birch is eager to praise the support she received from her fellow Midsummer Mischief playwrights during the writing process. Could this supportiveness be down to them all being women? Such a gender-essentialist argument is quickly dismissed: "Yeah, it’s great that we’re all women but that’s aside. We’re all writers and writing is writing." It is the only point during our interview that I become briefly aware of the revolutionary anger which so alarmed the Financial Times.

Birch has been commissioned to write another play by Clean Break – this time a full-length project she will not begin until after she has had a six-month residency in a women’s prison. She believes that as she grows in confidence, her work grows more political (FT beware). But in spite of this, Birch is keen to stress that it is always story, not politics, that drives her. Behind each of her plays is "a really good story" and her love of live story-telling, she tells me, "is why I wanted to become a playwright in the first place."