Any dinner table/bar-room chat about favourite films will normally throw up The Shawshank Redemption as being someone’s all-time number one. The reasons are not difficult to fathom. Great performances and directing aside, it touches on a raft of human values and qualities, good and bad. Fortitude, hope, tenacity, brotherhood in adversity, self-reliance, trust, adaptability, cunning, vice, bestiality, brutishness, selfishness, deceit, dependence and no doubt a few more are there to behold. In short, prison is shown as being a microcosm of life in a law-defined, lawless, womanless hell. Hell really is ‘other people’, but then so is salvation to be found in human fellowship.

And so to the play, adapted directly from the Stephen King novel by Owen O’Neill and Dave Johns. Andy Dufresne (Ian Kelsey), a sensitive, thoughtful man, wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife and her lover, initially finds himself to be the ‘outsider’ inside the penitentiary and buddies up with the only other rounded human being, Ellis ‘Red’ Redding (Patrick Robinson), who has been rightfully convicted for a crime of passion.

There is much swaggering, macho threat in the play, but unlike the film, much of the brutality and depravity of life inside the prison is, necessarily, sketchily drawn with, for example, the male rape incident being left to our imaginations – a task our imaginations perhaps do not want to undertake. Consequently, coming across as the nastiest piece of work is Bible toting, Warden Stammas (Owen O’Neill) whose signal lack of humanity, base duplicity, cupidity and incompetence as prison governor is chief factor in the mephitic moral atmosphere that pervades the prison.

Well, everyone gets their just deserts in the end and good wins out over bad, but whilst sins are not obviously absolved there is a kind of rebalancing – so perhaps King had in mind ‘redemption’ as ‘retrieval’ as much as anything else.

Ian Barritt offers a sympathetic performance as the Mole-like, institutionalised prison librarian whose life ultimately collapses shortly after his release, deprived of the enforced structure of Shawshank life.

Ian Kelsey gives a portrayal of quiet and dogged equanimity. Slow and purposeful he bides his time in the face of crushing injustice and cruelty before making his final escape.

Mr Robinson, whose character is part narrator, brings a good natured dose of level headed ballast to the sweep of the action. He plays the part with a dignified authority which attracts rather than demands attention. It is an accomplished performance.

Fans of the film will no doubt want to come to the stage version out of interest, but those unfamiliar with the story will also find a moving testament to human resilience in this cleverly staged and compelling production.   ★★★☆☆    Graham Wyles     22/09/15