Abstract
This thesis explores how the theatre can highlight the discrepancies between the representations of women’s prison in television and film and the day to day experiences of women incarcerated in New Zealand.
Using Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as a departure point, this thesis argues that punishment was once a public spectacle but is now a private enterprise, where the public are excluded from the penal narrative. This exclusion means that the images of prison life provided by film and television take on a unique importance as they provide some of the only representations of incarceration the general public see. These images are typically produced to entertain, enforce strict genre conventions and are often constructed for the male gaze. While the screen can be a place of voyeuristic pleasure, this thesis contends that theatre can enable witnessing, wherein spectators are made aware of the highly mediated and constructed process that goes into creating the images they see.
This thesis consists of a nominated creative component, a play, alongside traditional academic research. The play, titled I Didn’t Really Think It Would Be Like This, juxtaposes the conventions of the women in prison genre with testimony taken from women incarcerated in New Zealand to highlight that the images we traditionally see are not representative of the day to day experience of female inmates