Theatre: Jenni Fagan on adapting her novel The Panopticon for the stage

Look up the word “panopticon” and you’ll find that it refers to a design for a prison or other institution, originated by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 1790s. Bentham imagined a circular building, with a central surveillance point from which a warder could see every other part of the circle. A single guard cannot watch every part of the curve at the same time; but if the surveillance point is designed so that the guard can see out but the inmates cannot see in – creating what Bentham called “a sort of invisible omnipresence” – then the inmates will never know whether they are being watched or not, and will be under strong pressure to obey the rules.