LawPlay — Audio plays from the borderlands of capacity
Available now · Long-form audio drama from LPS Law MMXXVI · Volume One
The third arm of LPS Law

LawPlay

Stories about the law of the mind.

Audio plays from the borderlands of capacity — quiet, restrained, written for the listener who has had a real encounter with these decisions, and wants to feel less alone in the weight of them.

Now Playing

The Visit

Episode One · from Parts That Remember
Narrated by
Neil Ailen
Runtime
4 min
Listen on Spotify Episode One — The Visit
Continue below
Now Playing · The Flagship Work
Parts That Remember — cover art: a basement door in a quiet terraced kitchen, a toy dinosaur at its foot
LP · 01 Parts That Remember
Audiobook · LP·01 · The Flagship

Parts That Remember

A drama in five episodes and an epilogue, set across a small terraced house — and one locked basement door.

Elise Hart, a social worker, is asked to visit a quiet street the neighbours have begun to listen to at night. Number 12 is tidy in the wrong way — a spoon on the bottom stair, a plastic dinosaur turned to the wall — and Marcus, who lives there alone, will not say what he hears through the basement door.

Across five episodes the case opens outwards: a thinner-than-it-should-be file from 2006, a Mental Health Act assessment held back as a safety net, and a clinical psychologist who does not flinch. The play is about parts of a person that live in rooms others never enter — and what it means, in law, to knock anyway.

Written
Neil Allen
Narrated by
Neil Allen
Principal cast
Elise Hart · Marcus · Sophie · Dr Kay Howard · Jay · The Little One
Themes
Capacity · dissociation · safeguarding · the Mental Health Act
Form
5 episodes + epilogue · 26 min total
Content note
References to childhood neglect and confinement
Listen on Spotify — or pick an episode below

Episodes

Six parts · 26 min total
  1. 01 The Visit A social worker arrives. The neighbours have been listening. The man at Number 12 lives alone — or says he does. 4 min
  2. 02 Not Alone Elise returns with a community mental health nurse. The basement door has not moved. Something behind it has. 5 min
  3. 03 Fragments A safeguarding meeting. A GP call. A history he never finished telling. 5 min
  4. 04 The Door They bring a psychologist. They do not open the door. He does. 6 min
  5. 05 Parts That Remember Six months later, in a different garden, a different version of the same conversation. 4 min
  6. EP Echoes — Epilogue Another house. Another case. Another knock on the door. 2 min

The catalogue — three more works in the long-form service.

The Silent Rooms is out now · two more on the way
The Silent Rooms — a chained front door, a quiet living room beyond
LP · 02
Listen

The Silent Rooms

A Court of Protection drama · eleven chapters

A locked door, an over-medicated father, and a son who built a fortress when he meant to build a refuge. An emergency social-work visit becomes a Court of Protection case — and an archived file from 2017 returns to the surface, asking what we missed the first time.

Drama · serial 1h 48m
The Quiet After — a rain-slicked street at night, a paper bag of jelly sweets and a knife on wet stone
LP · 03
Coming soon

The Quiet After

A forensic drama · five tracks

After a fatal stabbing on a rain-slicked street, a forensic psychologist sees what the rest of the room will not — that the man in front of her is organised, not chaotic, and that one carelessly-spoken word collapsed twenty years. A Mental Health Act assessment becomes a study in how a mind survives.

Forensic · serial Coming soon
The Garden Gate — an elderly woman with a carer, at a wrought-iron gate in autumn light
LP · 04
Coming soon

The Garden Gate

A single-act drama · seven chapters

Every afternoon at three o'clock, Iris Pemberton puts on her coat, picks up her handbag, and walks to a wrought-iron gate that has not opened in eight months. A short, tender piece on a DoLS authorisation, a daughter who is both the lock and the key, and the question they ought to have been asking all along.

Single-act Coming soon
"Compliance is not contentment. A person who stops asking to leave when the door is locked has not chosen to stay. They have simply run out of ways to be heard."
— Neil Allen
A note from us

Some questions in capacity law are too human for a textbook. Whether to lock a gate. Whether to believe a man who insists he lives alone. Whether to keep asking, when the same answer comes back every day at three o'clock. We make these plays because the legal architecture of mental capacity is best understood from inside the rooms it governs — and because the people who do this work deserve a place to feel the weight of it, together.

LawPlay · LPS Law
Listen on
Neil Allen, barrister and writer of LawPlay
N · A
From the writer

Neil Allen

Barrister · 39 Essex Chambers · Founder, LPS Law

I have spent twenty years in the rooms where these decisions are made — at bedsides, in case conferences, before judges who must decide what protecting a person means when the person can no longer ask for themselves. The cases that stay with me are rarely the dramatic ones. They are the quiet ones. A wrought-iron gate. A locked basement door. A young man at a counter buying a bag of Jelly Babies after a stabbing he cannot explain.

LawPlay is where I write those stories down — and where, for now, I read them aloud. Not as case studies, and not as advocacy, but as drama, because drama is how we remember what we are otherwise tempted to file away. If you have done this work, or had it done to someone you love, I hope you find something in these plays that you have been carrying alone.

— N. A.
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