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 Sitting in a full house for the first time in over a year makes a definite good start to the matinee. Reassuringly, the audience is well behaved, eyes scanning the stage from above their masks as we wait for the opening act.
Black clothed flats and blind windows make a blank canvas for the set, cleverly designed by Rob Hebblethwaite. Together with its mottled floor, easily transforming from concrete to marble thanks to Nick Insley's lighting and a rich soundscape expertly created by Ruth Sullivan, it will bring us on a journey from expensive hotel halls and street markets in Kingston, to the alleys, dodgy basement flats and more hotel rooms in London. Quick and skilful scene dressing by a number of stagehands, part of Angelika Michitsch's stage management team, add the details.
 Mules follows two sisters in Jamaica and a young woman in London who are approached by the same powerful drug runner to be her 'mules' - to carry drugs onto aeroplanes in order to smuggle them across borders. The women have one thing in common : a grim past, a bleak present they wish to leave behind, and a 'chance' encounter with Bridie, the mid-level boss in an international drug-smuggling ring. Bridie, played with depth by Trudi Dane in her debut appearance with the Tower Theatre, is everything they wish to be : independent, rich, powerful and looking to invest in equally courageous women with the promise she will care after them like an 'older sister'.
 Playwright Winsome Pinnock, known as the 'godmother of Black British playwrights', tells us in the post-show Q & A that the play was first commissioned by Clean Break to tour female prisons. Since 1981, Clean Break creates theatre with and for women with experience of the criminal justice system. Ethical standards mean the stories are never representing only the real experience of one woman but rather blend in these experiences to reflect their reality, preserving anonymity. Pinnock gathered stories from the women taking part in her creative writing classes at Holloway Prison, as well as from interviews with other inmates and their families looked after by Hibiscus, a voluntary sector organisation that supports foreign nationals, and black, minority ethnic and refugee groups serving a custodial sentence, released into the community, or returned to their home country. From one of these meetings she developed the story of Lou and Lyla, two parentless sisters growing up in Kingston's ghetto. Tyan Jones and Oyinka Yusuff create a lovely sisterly bond, with the warmth, wrath and utter dependency on each other as well as tenderness, making us care for their fate as they step into the world of drug trafficking.
 Humour was essential, Pinnock explains. These women need to have some fun. So it isn't all doom and gloom and it certainly isn't victimising. As well as portraying the characters in a truthful way, it gives a fair representation of the ineluctability of their condition without hiding the part that their own will plays in determining their fate. They walk into it with big hopes, perhaps naïve, but their eyes are wide open on the potential consequences of their choice.
 Due to the particular touring aims and financial constraints, in the original production only three actors were hired to play twelve very different characters. The beauty of amateur theatre has meant that Landé Belo was able to indulge in her directorial choice of having the play performed by a cast of eight. This was a welcome opportunity for some new members to get their first tread on Tower Theatre's boards and for us in the audience to get to enjoy fresh talent.
 As with her previous production Fix Up, Landé directs with attention to detail and the actors are versatile enough to meet the technical demands placed on them, successfully bringing to the forefront their characters' struggles, humour and rich personalities. The play is rich with the multifarious accents, intonations, speech patterns and dialects of the various communities represented. From the Jamaican patois of the two sisters, to the idiosyncratic voices of Liverpudlian Allie, cockney Rog and American Bridie, all carefully coached by Peta Barker and Landé herself. Fights break out and develop with convincing venom thanks to fight director Richard Kirby's choreography.
 Mules is a great play to have at the Tower. Though it was first written in 1996, it asks some timely and essential questions. In what spaces are women allowed to exist? Are these women right to be more afraid of their confinement in the outside world than by the risk of imprisonment and even death? And what other routes do they have to freedom? The performance answers some of those questions. It is darkly fun but most of all, necessary.
Photography by David Sprecher
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