When we talk about crime and punishment, the notion of homecoming is often absent but decarceration and re-entry are critical aspects of the justice system. These subjects are at the heart of A Giant on the Bridge, the singer-songwriter Jo Mango and the theatre-maker Liam Hurley’s urgent piece of gig-theatre, which premiered in 2024 and heads out on tour across Scotland next month.
It was born from a research project, Distant Voices: Coming Home, that revealed dire statistics for the number of people who come out of prison and then go back in again, says Mango. “Research showed that the process is often less about the individuals and more about societal and structural issues – whether they can get a job when they come out, whether they have any family left who are there to support them.” A Giant on the Bridge emerged as “a kind of way of writing an essay about what we learned”, Mango says, but using songs co-written by people who have lived experience of the prison system.
For the project’s research associate, Phil Crockett Thomas, that songwriting process revealed something profound. Over about 20 intensive sessions in open and closed prisons and community justice settings, the team worked with roughly 200 people. “Coming home, punishment and disconnection from the world outside are extremely distressing experiences,” she says. “What we found was that collaborative songwriting allowed more space for people to explore those issues in the way that felt right to them.”
Often, participants chose not to write directly about prison at all. “They wrote about completely different things,” Crockett Thomas recalls. “Or they wrote daft and wonderful songs.” Music, she realised, functioned as “a resource for the self”, sometimes “a quiet form of resistance” within the prison environment.
One of the most striking moments of the show comes from a song audiences often assume was written by someone incarcerated. “It’s actually written by a prison officer,” Mango explains. The song reflects on a child whose father is absent because of military service, stressing that “although his daddy isn’t here in person, he’s around by phone and in our memories”.
Another song, Bars and Multicoloured Chairs, was written by someone nearing the end of their sentence. The lyrics highlight the complicated emotions that can be associated with release: “Don’t count the days, make the days count / Learn to cope, nose like a sniffer dog, I can smell home / We are human when we walk in / We turn to numbers, and we are forgotten.”
One audience favourite, Fuck It Button, emerged from a songwriting session that brought community members into prison spaces. Written by a participant in recovery, its blunt refrain – “I know you want to press the fuck it button, to oblivion and beyond” – resonates far beyond its context. “That moment where you decide whether you’re going to go ‘fuck it’ or not – that exists across loads of spectrums,” Mango says. “It’s an example of the way songs brought different people together and integrated different types of experience.”
Hurley, whose co-writing credits include Mixter Maxter for National Theatre of Scotland and Rowan Rheingans’ Fringe First-winning Dispatches on the Red Dress, led on the collaborative writing of the script that went alongside the songs. He brought to the project a recognition of theatre’s ability to hold emotional and ethical complexity. “It’s not a topic that I was engaged with before getting involved,” he says, “but I saw the opportunity to have an intelligent, emotional and human conversation through theatre, building on the songs that had already been created, around an issue that doesn’t really get spoken about with much compassion or nuance.”
Central to the show’s power is the plurality of voices, and on stage, these songs are performed by a remarkable ensemble of Scottish musicians whose individual identities help shape the storytelling. Alongside Mango herself, the cast comprises Louis Abbott from the group Admiral Fallow, Kim Grant (aka Raveloe), Jill O’Sullivan and the rapper Dave Hook.
Hurley describes them as “a Scottish indie folk supergroup” and says the piece’s theatrical magic lies in the act of collective imagination. “It’s that moment where a live performer is telling a story as themselves, and then they become the character,” he says. “You don’t need lights or sound or high production values for that to happen. It’s that spark of intimacy and connection. And we couldn’t be prouder of the cast, because none of them had considered themselves storytellers, and certainly not actors.”
Over many iterations, the show has grown more confident in its own shape. “At the start, everyone was trying so hard to do justice to the complexity and all the stories and all the people we’ve met,” Crockett Thomas reflects. “What’s been so good to see is that the show has become something of its own out of that. It’s got this confidence and this independence, and it’s still absolutely sensitively relating back to those earlier steps.” Hurley adds: “The audience experiences one story. Despite the disparate stories we start off with, it’s one satisfying emotional journey.”
For Crockett Thomas, theatre’s value lies in its capacity to hold contradictions. “Art can allow us to vicariously live through experiences we’ve not had ourselves,” she says. “And theatre can do justice to the messy complexity of homecoming.”
The team is clear-eyed about the political context in Scotland. “I’d like to see more challenge to the undeserved image of Scotland as progressive on justice issues,” Crockett Thomas says. Despite some reforms, imprisonment rates remain high, and deaths in custody are among the highest in Europe. “Why are we building more and bigger prisons rather than trying to decarcerate?” she asks.
Ultimately, A Giant on the Bridge doesn’t give simple answers. What it offers instead is a shared space – to listen, to feel, and to sit with discomfort. Hurley hopes audiences leave “emotionally opened, intellectually stimulated, but also productively discombobulated”. He sums up the spirit of the piece: “We can’t all talk at the same time, but we can all sing at the same time.”
A Giant on the Bridge is at Cottier’s theatre, Glasgow, 25-26 February. Then touring
