So. A Russian prostitute has been
murdered in a spectacularly brutal way for attempting to inform on
her “owner”. The British police track down the killer in Germany
because his sperm was in her hair: he'd wanked on her head whilst it
was held in a vice, then sawed her head off with a blunt hacksaw.
Whilst she was alive. But he isn't the big baddie. No, that's his
Estonian boss, who made him do it.
Now we meet the boss, and his gang of
sex-traffickers. They discuss the realities of market capitalism:
the fact that very soon the traffic will be going in the opposite
direction. They'll be getting girls from Amsterdam, Berlin and
London, and selling them to Beijing, Moscow and Rio de Janiero. In
between, they mock the silent prostitute who sits in the room with
them: calling her stupid, giving her a name like a dog, discussing
the smell of her. Then they're violent towards her.
Does this sound like fun entertainment
yet?
I mean, we've seen something a bit like
this before, right? We've had ordinary, sordid, naturalistic
versions of this story before. On stage. On TV. I myself got into
a terrible state by stupidly watching the whole of Abi Morgan's Sex Traffic in one go whilst on my own, with no-one to reassure me that
no, all men do not despise all women. All women are not helpless,
silent, at the mercy of whoever's the strongest and most violent.
Ah, but this is different. This is a
brilliant, genre-changing, horribly funny, nightmarish version of the
story. It's been made as an international collaboration between three amazing companies.
So the predatory men sometimes wear
wolf masks. The mostly silent women sometimes wear deer
head-dresses. People sing, and dance. The blonde, musclar Estonian
gang come on like some kind of Aryan fantasy in white vests and
boxing gloves, and beat hell out of the set whilst having their chat
about market capitalism. The silent prostitute in the corner is
wearing a very expensive and restrained green silk dress and carrying
a silver platter. When the men talk about getting girls from London,
they clock the audience, checking out some of the women and smirking
at us. A chunk of the audience giggles at their theatrical
naughtiness.
Or perhaps at the idea of being
trafficked by these men. Because that would be great fun, hey? When
they're violent towards you, they just spit cucumber at you, or stamp
on it in a theatrical demonstration of violence. It's not actual
violence. No women were harmed in the making of this play. It's all
just a play, Sarah. Stop taking it so fucking seriously.
So I left. I walked out from the front
row and went home. And I wish I'd gone earlier, because then I would
have fewer of these images in my mind. And I would feel less disturbed about what all those middle-aged middle-class white men who made that
piece of work really feel about women. When they put eleven strong
male actors on stage, of all ages, shapes and sizes, and only two young, slim, beautiful and mostly silent women. When they let the men on
stage look at me the way the scary men on street corners in Brixton
sometimes look at me when I walk home late at night. When they fill
my head with horror. And give me no hope.
