This play is a fiction tinged with reality because A Woman Inside is also the culmination of two paths. The playwright and director, Sophie Besse, a keen theatre actress, is also a clinical psychologist and worked for five years with female inmates at the Prison for Women in Fleury-Merogis, France. For her casting Sophie has naturally chosen actresses trained in classical theatre but also actresses trained at Clean Break, a London-based theatre and education company working with women whose lives have been affected by the criminal justice system.

I had these women's words but also their silences, their tears, their laughter, their violence, their fragility, their beauty, their pain, their crimes and their wounds. I had prison, its confinement, its dirt, its incessant noises, its eyes following them everywhere, its intrusion within their bodies.

I drew a white square on stage. I put two amazing actresses within it. I locked them up together and the images came to life, so did the lights, the music, and finally their words.

 Sophie NL Besse