Review: A DoL House
Review: A DoL House
Each year, more than a thousand vulnerable teenagers are placed under Deprivation of Liberty orders, held under constant supervision in the name of safety. This fact is not known to many people, and certainly wasn’t to me, before seeing A DoL House at The Big House.
A DoL House is the latest theatre offering from the London arts charity that works with young care leavers, providing a platform for them to participate in the creation of theatre. Written by BAFTA-award-winning writer David Watson and directed by Offie-award-winning Maggie Norris, the play was crafted together with The Big House members, judges, and legal experts, to raise awareness of the painful reality of its subject matter.
A Deprivation of Liberty order (or DoL) is a legal mechanism that authorises the confinement of an individual to a specific place. Young people placed under DoLs are subject to confinement usually for upwards of three months, stripped of certain rights, and watched at all times by – often untrained – support workers.
This is the setting in which we find ourselves in A DoL House. Our protagonist is Leyla, a fifteen-year-old freshly placed under Deprivation of Liberty, confined to one room in which she is supervised constantly by Jag and Jason, two support workers with conflicting ideas of how best to handle Leyla. The play is a three-hander, the claustrophobic setting reduced to one tight space: the single bedroom in which Leyla finds herself, for lack of a better word, captive.
The play confronts you from the very first second, in which Leyla wakes up screaming and disoriented, unaware of where she is, why she is there, or even who the strangers keeping her there are. The confusion is deliberate, placing you immediately in Leyla’s headspace, and the headspace of every child who has woken up to find themselves in a similar situation.
The entire hour-and-twenty-minute runtime has the quality of a pressure cooker, as Leyla navigates the circumstances of her entrapment, locked in a battle of wills with her supervisors. The questions the story is asking readily reveal themselves: what is the line between state protection and control? How much does the system really protect vulnerable children? Is denying an individual almost their entire autonomy really the right way to keep them safe?
The performances are engrossing and packed with vitality, from Jag and Jason, who represent two wildly different approaches to support work, to Anais Lone’s electric and moving performance as Leyla, who remains vitally human in the face of a system that consistently dehumanises her. The writing, by turns clever and tear-jerking, conveys both deep empathy for its subject and rage at the failures of the system, weaving a moving and confronting tale of the ways in which vulnerable young people are continually denied their personhood.
Intense, provocative, impactful and poignant; this is a play that will stay with you long after it’s over.
