One room. Three people. The system is the fourth.
There is a teenager in a room. She does not know where the room is, why she is there, or who the strangers watching her are. The law calls this protection.
A Deprivation of Liberty (DoL) order is a legal mechanism most people have never heard of, and the system that administers it would perhaps prefer to keep things that way. Each year, more than a thousand vulnerable teenagers are confined and held under constant supervision, stripped of certain rights and placed in unregulated settings by a bureaucracy that has settled on the word “safe” as a way of not having to use the word “captive.” Before you have time to feel too comfortable about not knowing this, A DoL House puts you in the room with her.
The set is spare to the point of argument: a bed, a desk and chair bolted to the floor and a bin bag that serves as both luggage for Leyla, who has been moved overnight to an unknown part of the city and is, to put it mildly, not pleased about it. A staircase delivers and retrieves her two supervisors with the weary regularity of people logging their hours very carefully. The dollhouse of the title is not subtle, but then neither is locking a teenager in a room and calling it welfare.
What it is doing is giving you three people in an impossible situation and asking you to watch what happens. Jason, one of the two support workers assigned to Leyla’s round-the-clock supervision, arrives with his procedures, which begin and end with the Likert scale, a satisfaction survey her case file requires regardless of whether she is, in any meaningful sense, satisfied. Jag, the other, is quietly insurgent, and is attempting to reach Leyla through means for which no protocol exists.
The production is loud because this is what it looks like when a system and a person who refuses to be processed by it share eighty minutes and one small room. Jag (Zarif Hussain) operates entirely outside the available frameworks, finding the comedy and the conscience in equal measure. James Atwell’s Jason, meanwhile, is not quite a villain and not quite wrong, which is a harder thing to play than it sounds. Anais Lone as Leyla holds the stage with the kind of energy that makes the room feel smaller the longer the play goes on, which is very much the point, performed, notably, by care-experienced actors from The Big House’s own Open House programme, which lends the whole thing a weight that no amount of research alone could manufacture.
A DoL House is art for purpose, and it knows it, and that transparency is part of what makes it work. It is also alive on stage, funny in the right moments, devastating in others and constructed with enough craft that the argument it’s making arrives through the drama rather than despite it. See it because the subject matters, yes, but also because it’s good.
A DoL House runs at The Big House, London until 11th July. Tickets here.