Prison scraps planned on-site opera performance

A site-specific performance of a new opera scheduled to be staged at Wormwood Scrubs has been cancelled by prison bosses with less than a week's notice.

Centred on a fictional encounter between Ivor Novello and gangster “Mad” Frankie Fraser, the opera 1944: Home Fires was due to be performed in the chapel at Wormwood Scrubs today (5 September) after opening at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone last week.

Posting on Instagram, the show’s production company Homo Promos said it was “devastated” to learn on Friday that the 45-minute performance had been axed with “no explanation” from the Prison Service.

Producer Peter Scott-Presland said, “This was going to be the high point of the tour and a homage to a great gay icon. 

“To cancel at four days' notice without any reason given is unbelievably unprofessional and a great step back in the progress the Prison Service has been making towards equality and diversity.”

Director Emily Beech posted on X (formerly Twitter) that prison leaders pulled the plug after “months of notice, planning and liaising with us (including access to the script since June)”. She added that “making community-minded opera should not be this difficult”.

In a statement to The Times, a Prison Service spokesman said, “The Prison Service is proud to be an inclusive employer, but facilitating this event would not, at the moment, have been the best use of officers’ time at Wormwood Scrubs.”

Taking inspiration from the weeks that actor, singer and composer Ivor Novello spent incarcerated at Wormwood Scrubs in 1944 for misuse of petrol coupons, the opera imagines the popular entertainer sharing a cell with the notorious gangster Frankie Fraser. Fraser spent 42 years behind bars for crimes including bank robbery and is thought to have been in Wormwood Scrubs at the same time as Novello.

Scott-Presland told The Times that although his proposal to perform the opera in situ at Wormwood Scrubs was initially well received by prison staff, after a second site visit last Wednesday, he received an email saying the show was being cancelled on the orders of senior leaders in the Prison Service.

He said, “No reason was given whatsoever. I get the impression that although some staff are really keen on doing this sort of support work for LGBT prisoners and so on, there are other people who are absolutely paranoid in the Prison Service and probably the Home Office as well that this is going to become a weapon in the woke wars, that the right-wing tabloids are going to get hold of it.

“But it is not costing taxpayers money. We are funding this. The Prison Service is not paying us a fee."

He added, “It is not a show about sexuality. Novello was sent to prison for eight weeks. He was the biggest thing in the West End at the time, and he thought he had lost everything. What goes on in the course of the opera is him trying to recover his mojo. It is about a gay character, but it is about other aspects of that character.”