Sent to die in jail, 21 year old Rick Cluchey found his voice in prison theatre. The Firm went inside to meet one of life's survivors as he teamed up with Glasgow's Theatre Nemo to Bring hope and Beckett to Barlinnie.

The journey to Damascus included a life changing conversion for St Paul. Scarlett O’ Hara’s moment of clarity came as she contemplated hunger and a raw carrot in the dirt of Tara. Bob Geldof watched Michael Burke on the BBC News, and neither his life nor the millions he has touched has ever been the same again. The spark of a Damascene conversion can be initiated in any one of a thousand other ways, and for Rick Cluchey it happened in a theatre.

As a young man serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole, there may have seemed little point in reaching out to the arts, but from the only-way-is-up reality of life in California’s San Quentin prison – where yes, he did meet Johnny Cash- theatre represented light at the end of a very dark tunnel, as well as an opportunity to step outside himself. Such moments change lives, and after his interminable sentence was commuted and he was finally released, Cluchey set about changing a few more, on a quest that brought him one wet Tuesday in August, to Barlinnie prison, where he stood alone before a roomful of Glasgow’s sceptical forgotten, and transported them into the introspective world of Samuel Beckett for 45 intense minutes; all the time it took to ensure that many of them will also never be the same again.

He came to Glasgow through an interface with Theatre Nemo, the outreach volunteer theatre group who have been promoting mental well being through the arts for many years, and have performed in Barlinnie before. Nemo’s founder and director Isobel McCue knows the value of well timed creative arts intervention, a perspective shared by Barlinnie’s progressive Governor, the philosophical Bill McKinlay, who has clearly hit his stride and is relishing his tenure in his seventh year at the helm of one of Scotland’s busiest and most compromised prison estates. He has long been an advocate of the merits of Theatre Nemo’s work, and Cluchey, returning to the prison he first visited over thirty years ago, maintains that the value of bringing theatre and the arts to prison cannot be underestimated.

“It is so necessary to reach out to disadvantaged people, whether they find themselves in the Gorbals or find themselves in a prison or institution, because if we don’t reach out to the good in someone, something comes along and exploits the bad in that person,” he says, having stepped off the stage and addressed the Barlinnie audience in a spirited and engrossing Q&A.

“Our society has to find alternatives to incarceration, and Isobel and myself feel that theatre can turn the page for some people. Once a person is incarcerated for any length of time, things harden up and turn deeply negative within that human being. These institutions are not positive places. They are places of punishment. When the law has been already served - when you remove a man or a woman from society and incarcerate them - that’s the punishment, right there. You remove a person from his family.

“To further punish a person in place of incarceration seems to be the wrong approach. What happens is that prisons become revolving doors and society doesn’t benefit. We are paying enormous amounts of human resource by incarcerating, and paying enormous amounts of our capital, our value that society doesn’t receive when you incarcerate someone. That is a negative drain; the money never comes back to the community.”

Cluchey is still sweating from a draining solo performance of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’, exhausting to experience even for the seasoned theatregoer. The improvised theatre in the prison chapel at Barlinnie with its cavernous echo is not an ideal stage setting, and the audience are without the advantages of extensive cultural education, but they sit patiently mesmerised, and are effusive in their enthusiasm for the actor in their midst, particularly once they see his tattooed forearms and realise he has not come to condescend, but to share.

“It is very difficult for people to sit in silence. Our lives are so busy and noisy. The concentration and the way they sat through the whole thing was amazing,” says Theatre Nemo’s Isobel McCue. “They were really interested in what had happened to Rick and what had come out of prison theatre, and what happens to the men who have done it. They are really engaged in the whole process I am hoping that those who came in from outside will really see the benefit. To take it away and really try and spread the we word, to avoid the negative headlines that we see.”

Cluchey’s work with the San Quentin Drama Workshop came to the attention of Samuel Beckett himself, and the two men worked together in Berlin. His mission extends beyond the performance of plays to a prison audience, and he has developed his work as a call to arms advocating for greater political and practical change in prison policy. It is, he believes, in everyone’s interests. And he is not blind to the scale of the work that has to follow a theatre performance.

“Hope is not a strategy. Things have to happen and people have to get involved. To empower people to have the courage to come to the system, the institutions, and to try to make changes,” he says. “The citizens of Glasgow and the people of Scotland deserve a better return on their investment. They know that they are losing human resource and losing capital. These institutions seem to be holding pens. There is no rehabilitation and the money is never going to be spent on rehabilitation. If we admit that, we have to look at the law and find people who can stand up and be counted in the legislature and in the government, and say we have to have the courage to take a chance on change; to make changes.

“One of my big problems with incarcerated populations is that they don’t deserve the treatment they get. I understand that some people need to be locked up, for their own protection, if not ours. But for people who have mental illnesses, we don’t have answers for that, and incarceration is not an answer.

“Here in Barlinnie years ago there was a unit called the special unit, and I came in back in the early 1970s and met Jimmy Boyle, who cooked me a meal. This blew my mind; I was still in parole from San Quentin, to find the progressive attitude in the prison system in Scotland, opposed to the attitude towards incarcerated people in San Quentin, California and other prisons in America… it was quite a difference.

“I see that we still have the possibility here in Scotland. I see the spirit of it, I saw it in the Governor, Bill Mckinlay, and in the director of corrections here in Scotland. It is not a closed story, but there has to be an initiative, people in the community of a certain amount of prestige and standing, who can look at the government, and say to them ‘ this is not working’. We need to have the courage to face change.”

Cluchey only spoke to the Barlinnie audience for fifteen minutes, but they clutched him to their collective bosom and had practically adopted him as one of their own before he had left. A captive audience they may have been, but their engagement was effusive and willing, and it is both McCue’s and Cluchey’s hope that they can inspire even the smallest change in perspective, the ripple effect of which could be profound on the life of the individual, their family, and the wider world. “

It is not just about entertainment. It changes people’s whole perception, how they look at things once they become involved in theatre,” McCue explains. “Self esteem is the big thing. You notice it, just within weeks, It is not something that takes a long, long time. It is like taking off blinkers. They look at life in a totally different way. And it is so obvious. Everyone notices it, from the guards to the nurses. They see the change, and it ripples out to the whole family. They feel happier, and have new things to talk about.” Cluchey also saw the early signs of change as a result of the seed planted by his visit and performance, as evidenced by the enthusiastic response.

 “The guys that I met in that room – you don’t find any harder looking, tougher looking men anywhere on the planet,” says the San Quentin veteran. “Glasgow has to have some of the toughest people I’ve ever met. And to find their interests challenged by this…my God. If I am an example of someone how made it, I can help be an example for change, a witness for change. It was very exciting. And we had a good result.”

Time will tell. As Scarlett O’Hara so memorably put it, tomorrow is another day.