Review: A Giant on the Bridge

Music as dialogue in the criminal justice system

“If songs were lines in a conversation / The situation would be fine.” The closing lines of Nick Drake’s ‘Hazy Jane II’ speak to the power of music to communicate across barriers. In A Giant on the Bridge, an Edinburgh Fringe play that came to The Byre Theatre on 27 February, those barriers are prison walls.

The lights went down as a violin sounded its opening notes, revealing a living room set-up, with sofas and bookshelves overgrown with vines. The smoke machine was in full force. Through the fog and the vines emerged a home half-forgotten, most likely the home of those at the heart of this play, those returning from prison. “The system takes people away from everything, from their home, from each other, and from themselves,” said performer and musical director of A Giant on the Bridge, Jo Mango, adding that the production aimed to “re-humanise those that are so easily demonised.”

Researchers from the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of the West of Scotland worked with the Scottish Centre for Criminal Justice Research and the charity Vox Liminus to collaborate with people who had lived experience of the criminal justice system, using songwriting to explore the complexity of returning home after time in prison. “Writing songs with people gets a different kind of answer than an interview,” reflected Mango. And so, working with over 200 people, more than 150 songs became the foundation for A Giant on the Bridge, and were later transformed from a collaborative archive into a live performance.

“If these songs were people, how would you get them to talk to each other?” asked Mango, not unlike Nick Drake. The songs performed on stage are an attempt to make dialogue happen through the bars of our justice system. The result is a production made up of several narratives that converge around the theme of homecoming, some from inside prison, others from those waiting beyond its walls. These stories become entangled with each other until what were initially stand-alone songs become something resembling a chorus, or even a community. 

Mango mentioned that “there is a bigger conversation to be had about whether better dialogue can be part of our justice system,” and A Giant on the Bridge gestures towards what that conversation might be. In Northern Ireland, restorative justice programmes bring victims and perpetrators together to decide what accountability should look like. It is a system built on dialogue. Discussions with practitioners working in these programmes helped shape the thinking behind A Giant on the Bridge, where the question becomes not only how people return home after prison, but how they begin to speak to each other again. Music offers another route into that process. Music-based interventions have a long history of use in prisons, dating back to the late 1800s. With diagnosed psychiatric conditions being more common in prisons, songwriting can offer a rare space for reflection. The songs gathered for this production do not try to resolve the tensions of crime, but by giving a voice to experiences on both sides of the prison wall, they quietly turn stories into the conversation that our current justice system rarely allows.  

Whilst A Giant on the Bridge was highly innovative, executing this vision was always going to be challenging. I found myself waiting for something that would elevate a well-meaning but still very tell-don’t-show production from a volunteer-group-comes-to-your-school-to-teach-you-about-prison-through-theatre-and-music performance to something that could genuinely move me. Instead, the play rarely landed with the emotional impact promised by the subject matter. This should by no means undermine the importance of what A Giant on the Bridge is about. Music, like all art, connects and heals, and it has had remarkable success in prison outreach programmes. Ultimately, A Giant on the Bridge remains a work in progress, but then, so too does the dialogue it seeks to begin.

Photo courtesy of Tommy Ga-Ken Wan