Director: Matthew Taylor

Based on the play of the same name, ‘Monster’ won the Audience Choice Award at the 2003 Big Issue Film Festival.

Paul Malcolm, an ex-offender turned actor who plays the part of Alfred, says: “Alfred is an immediately recognisable figure. Most of us, living in cities, have encountered him and quickly passed by. A disturbing homeless alcoholic, a pariah: Alfred’s tragic story is a fiction but his life on the streets is lived today by many real people, people living in their own tragedies. Hopefully, at least, Monster will make us pause before we pass by again.”

Escape Artists came first for the Audience Prize at the second Big Issue Film Festival in London.

“We are still doing the theatre but film provides additional benefits. We don’t have to work in a fixed time frame which in theatre you have to do. It gives us a degree of flexibility. And also with a lot of the client groups we work with we find they’re not able to attend on a regular basis because they’ve got problems they need to address. When it comes to a theatre production it becomes difficult to get them all there at the same time. But with film you can film, edit and so on when people aren’t there so film is much more flexible.”
(Matthew Taylor, co-founder of Escape Artists and Director of Monster, commenting on the power of film.)

Paul co-founded Escape artists with theatre director Matthew Taylor in 1996. In 1991 Matthew got an invitation by 2 ‘lifers’ to direct a play inside HMP Wayland in Norfolk. Four years and several successful productions later he set up Escape Artists so that he could continue to support ex-prisoners.

The company works with paroled and ex-prisoners, young offenders and young people at risk, through performance and other arts based activities, helping them form a pathway back in to society.