Penned Up – Greenwich Theatre | Review.
London Theatre 1 by Bernadette Lintunen September 14, 2025.
“Penned Up is as entertaining as it is moving – a testament to the power of art in unlikely places. It deserves to travel far beyond Greenwich Theatre and be seen by audiences everywhere.”
Penned Up is a bold, funny, and deeply poignant new play written and directed by Danusia Iwaszko, a playwright and teacher who spent 17 years, running playwriting courses in prisons. Drawing on her real-life experience, Iwaszko delivers a story set entirely within a prison classroom – yet the world she creates feels expansive, vibrant, and profoundly human.
The ensemble consists of eight characters: six prisoners, their tutor Dorota (Rebecca Peyton), a playwright brimming with warmth and enthusiasm, and Mike (Chris Clarkson), the watchful but often wry prison guard. Dorota clearly adores her job. She’s not just teaching writing, she’s teaching her students to see their own lives as worthy of art. Through gentle but persistent encouragement, she shows them how to shape their thoughts into narratives, how to develop characters drawn from truth, experience and, crucially, how to trust their own voices.
At first, most of the prisoners seem indifferent – why bother with a writing class when prison life has hardened them against vulnerability? The exception is Ben (Ashton Owen), a young, openly gay inmate serving time for drug dealing, who greets the process with eager energy. But week by week, something shifts. The men return to class not out of obligation but because, for a couple of hours, the classroom becomes a space where doors in their minds unlock. Laughter flows, perspectives broaden, and walls, both literal and emotional, begin to crumble.
Iwaszko’s writing allows us to slowly uncover each prisoner’s backstory, their crimes, and the wounds that shaped them. The class is a tapestry of mixed abilities; some inmates are barely literate, others live with ADHD or dyslexia, and one is highly educated but damaged in other ways. Dorota never condescends; she treats every man as if his story matters, and Peyton embodies her with complete conviction. Her Dorota is empathetic, resilient, and utterly believable, a teacher who sees potential where the world has written people off.
The prisoners’ short plays, crafted from their own experiences, become miniature windows into their lives. One particularly cheeky young inmate, Ed (Liam Watson), at first a clown, always cracking jokes, performs his piece only to break down mid-scene, revealing a lifetime of buried hurt. In another powerful moment, Jermaine (Ntabiso Bhebhe), who initially refused even to sit down in class, begins to engage, his defences gently dismantled by Dorota’s patience. Each transformation feels earned, never sentimentalised.
The beauty of Penned Up lies in its pacing and honesty. Iwaszko doesn’t rush revelations or resort to clichés. Instead, she allows the characters to breathe, inviting us to care for them before showing us their scars. The humour is abundant; there are genuine, hearty laughs, but the emotional weight lands just as hard. By the end, we’re reminded that even in the bleakest places, creative expression can offer healing, dignity, and hope.
This isn’t just a story about prisoners; it’s a story about humanity, the need to be heard and understood, and treated with kindness. It’s about what happens when someone believes in you, even when you don’t believe in yourself. The play suggests that, given time (which these men have in abundance) and humility, extraordinary growth is possible.
Penned Up is as entertaining as it is moving – a testament to the power of art in unlikely places. It deserves to travel far beyond Greenwich Theatre and be seen by audiences everywhere.
Ipswich 24
https://www.ipswich24.co.uk/2025/09/12/review-penned-up/
A beautiful piece of theatre. Wonderfully cast with believable characters. Penned Up tackles sensitive subjects well, with just the right amount of light and shade.
It’s laugh out loud funny at times, however the brilliant writing of this piece allows the audience to feel the emotion of the characters too. A very enjoyable visit to the theatre, tackling the subject in a fabulous way. We laughed, we cried and just like tutor Dorota, we were sad to say goodbye to the prisoners at the end of their playwrighting course…
Suffolk Sound (Karen Cannard) - “top star rating”
https://www.facebook.com/SuffolkSoundRadio/?locale=en_GB
If you are lucky to live in the touring region of this brand-new play, cancel your plans now and book a ticket for your nearest performance of Penned Up. You won’t regret it. It’s a production that guarantees warm smiles, LOLs and tear-jerking moments too.
The writing is superb, with quick-witted dialogue and perfectly timed jokes. Penned Up is a play of optimism, transformation and human connection. It’s most certainly a very entertaining and thought-provoking night out with a top star rating for a fantastic cast and production credits.
This play has left me hungry for more - in a good way - such is the ease of connecting with the characters and their stories.
Grapevine (Extract)
Danusia Iwaszko, the writer/director of Penned Up and CEO of The Hal Company is an amazing and inspirational person. This earthy, witty and thought-provoking play is full of emotion and expression Overall it’s a wonderful celebration of what channelling energies creatively can achieve. This play is exceptional. It takes us metaphorically from Brazilian rainforests to the East End of London and then onto a remote Scottish island.
It takes our preconceived ideas of prisoners’ ability to use anything other than force and violence to get their point across. Most of all it demonstrates how being part of a group that can share thoughts and emotions openly and honestly can also help to heal each other’s pasts and make their futures a better place. A truly inspiring story, brilliantly written and beautifully acted - Penned Up definitely got the thumbs up from me.
All That Dazzles
https://www.allthatdazzles.co.uk/post/review-penned-up-greenwich-theatre---uk-tour
Packed with laughs, the contrast between the green prisoners and your typical drama class set-up made for some great comedic moments that really locked the audience in from the start.
The absolute truthfulness the actors brought to the characters, particularly the role of Dorota Tokarska (based on Iwaszko herself) played by Rebecca Peyton, made me often forget I was even watching a play, but that I was learning and participating in the class myself. I feel like I could write my own play now!
Diversity on stage is always a delight to witness. In the case of Penned Up, it was a joy to not only see that diversity in terms of race, but also in religion, age, neurodiversity and the sexuality of the prisoners. That paired with the wide range of convictions the prisoners held; some violent, some not, really challenged that stereotypical perception that many of us have when we think of a man behind bars. I appreciate Iwaszko’s clarity in delivering an important message through her writing
All in all, Penned Up is a heartfelt, funny, and engaging piece of theatre that shines a light on the transformative power of creativity in the most unlikely of places.
The production succeeds in giving voice to those so often silenced and reminding us of the humanity that exists behind prison walls.
With humour, honesty, and compassion, Iwaszko and her cast leave the audience with a renewed sense of empathy - and a belief in the redemptive power of words. Maybe words really can lead to the great escape.
Bury Free Press Article and Review.
19th Sept 2025
Prison plans are so dismaying. It is dismaying that despite last year’s general election manifesto, the Labour government is set to slash frontline spending on education courses in prisons by up to 50%. As recently as July, prisons minister James Timpson wrote: “We know that purposeful activity can help to enable safe and decent prisons and have a transformative effect on reoffending rates.” Timpson knows what he speaks.
His company, Timpson’s, is one of the largest employers of ex-offenders; more than 12% of their 4500+ colleagues have a past criminal conviction, and the company established specialist training academies to help prepare imprisoned people for work post release. The statistics speak for themselves; a 2022 report by the Parliamentary Education Committee found people who had participated in education I in prison were significantly less likely to reoffend within 12 months of release than those who had not.
The potential loss of prison education with a creative focus hits me hard. I have worked in prisons and probation services (albeit a long time ago), delivering health education and therapeutic programmes and seen first hand how enriching these are. Because of this, I was delighted to receive an invitation to the premiere of Hal Company’s ‘Penned Up’ at the Theatre Royal. Written by Bury St Edmunds-based writer and director Danusia Iwaszko and set in a classroom at HMP Ditchfield, a group of men are tasked with writing their own plays, supported by Dorota, the tutor. Danusia’s 17 years of experience as a creative writing tutor in prisons across England gives the audience a very real insight into prison education’s mysterious hinterlands, and its creative importance.
Over the course of this humane, moving, and sharply witty two-act play, we witnessed what happens when imprisoned men abandon their defensiveness and gain confidence in the creative expression of emotions and experiences that are intrinsic to everyone, whether imprisoned or not. We see that education is valuable for its own sake, not just to improve employability, but to help us understand and express what it is to be human, whether through a play about musical animals in the Amazon (Ben), an ancient saint from Iona (Finlay), forced labour in Pakistan (Mo), scenes set in a boxing ring (Ed) or during a heist (Franky), and a rap about family (Jermaine). Tutoring prisoners is not easy, though. Data shows that over 30% of prisoners have a learning difficulty or learning challenges, and it is likely these figures are an underestimate; several of the men in Penned Up are semi-literate, and the reasons behind this are deeply intersectional (ADHD, dyslexia, behavioural) with roots in early childhood.
Prisoners can be moved across the prison estate at short notice, truncating their learning and diminishing their motivation to continue. Staff shortages mean a lack of prison officers to escort prisoners to and from classes and conduct risk assessments so they can attend in the first place, resulting in a real decline in the number of prisoners attending educational programmes. Penned Up addresses these head-on.
Yet despite these challenges, there’s a beautiful clarity to working with imprisoned people. “You can teach a nice, pleasant group of people outside and they’re nice and pleasant and they say nice, pleasant things, know what they want to write and write, but well…with this lot, it’s different,” remarks tutor Dorota to prison officer Mike when he questions the worth of creative writing classes in prison. “It’s different because …because there’s no bullshit! That’s it! They’re direct, frank, I like it.” That frankness can, at times, be disruptive as the play makes clear, resulting in one man being removed from the class. Penned Up does not soft-soap this; the tension in some scenes reminded me very much of my experiences working in prisons. If you believe prisons should be a place of punishment only, please know the evidence for the effectiveness of this approach does not stack up. If you struggle to see the value of prison education, I implore you to see Penned Up. It just might change your mind.