Maze escape film shows ‘progress needs dialogue’

A film about the 1983 IRA prison escape at the Maze shows that dialogue is the best way forward, according to the lead actor – Love/Hate’s Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.

The film, which is based on the escape from the high-security facility by 38 inmates, had its Northern Ireland premiere in Belfast on Thursday night.

Vaughan-Lawlor plays the republican prisoner who organised what was the biggest jail break in British prison history.

The movie, entitled Maze, centres on the relationship between Vaughan-Lawlor’s character and a prison warder played by Barry Ward.

“There is counterpoint between the two characters,” Vaughan-Lawlor said.

“But there always is very great common ground and that that dialogue is this kind of dance of them trying to understand each other.”

Ward added that the characters forced each other to self-reflect.

In the movie, a warder is befriended by a prisoner trying to better understand prison procedures and identify weaknesses which could allow an escape, but who is also depicted as wanting a better future for his family.

The prison officer is rendered a virtual prisoner at home after a failed attack on him while out with his family left him needing enhanced security.

In real life, one prison officer died of a heart attack after being stabbed during the escape, while two others were shot.

Concerns had been raised that the film would romanticise IRA violence.

However, Vaughan-Lawlor said it was not a sentimentalised or dewy-eyed account, or a piece of propaganda.

“The heart of the film for me is this relationship, and if that was not there and it was just a straight story about a prison escape, I would not have had any interest in doing it, because it would have been a very slight, insensitive, boring film,” he said.