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Latitude
2010
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News
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Latitude Festival 2010 Reviews (5)Fair TradeBy Shelley Davenport and Anna Holbek with Kate Ferguson Samai comes from an African country torn apart by war; Elena from a tiny Albanian village. Both have been brought by illegal means to London. Both discover that the one who facilitated their passage is now their jailor. Shatterbox Theatre Company have created a forceful, straightforward and (inevitably) moving piece about sex trafficking, aiming to highlight how these girls exist alongside us as we go about our everyday lives in a supposedly civilised Western city. Samai lost all her family in the war and was offered the chance to go to London and so the prospect of a new life. Elena was seduced by the thought of riches. Samai's destroyer is the man who gets her in to the country, and then suggests she stay with him while she finds his feet; of course, before long he is demanding she perform sexual favours for both him and others. Elena, meanwhile, is smuggled into the country by a woman who promises to find her work but ends up enslaving her with the demand that she work as a prostitute until she has paid off the thousands of pounds she owes for her passage over. She's a repulsive character, a jaded and heartless female pimp who we learn has destroyed many other girls in the same way. Of course we know what the show is about, and we know enough about the subject generally, so that the twists in Samai and Elena's tales come as no surprise to us. The show struggles to find a genuine revelation it can offer us. But the two main roles are very affectingly played by Sarah Amankwah and Anna Holbek. And Shatterbox have found an effective way to tell their story, by dipping into various pop culture media for little segments punctuating the main narrative: a honey-voiced trailer advertising prostitution as glamorous and empowering and "not like the old days"; a Steve Irwin-style wildlife documentary narration, describing the actions of the men who visit the two women. There's a satirical auction scene too, with a slimy geezer announcing "Brand new merch - fresh out of the Urals". And when Elena first leaves her home village we get a reimagined version of a pantomime scene - Cinderella to be exact - where Buttons has a particularly pressing reason for wanting the heroine to stay at home with him and not go off into the world to look for her prince. Though these diversions make the tone a little uncertain sometimes, they work well for underlining the utterly casual and flippant attitude of the individuals who have destroyed these women's lives. It is all a game to them. One scene stands out, as getting to the human heart of these particular characters' situations more than the others. A stag do is visiting a brothel - the lads assuring each other that it's all above board and the girls are doing it out of choice - but one of the party, on finding himself alone with a prostitute, cannot help but feel the natural human awkwardness of the situation. His dealing with her is excruciatingly embarrassing and sad. More acute and specific character experiences like this would have been good to see. But the company's committed delivery of this story has a force that can't be denied. Corinne Salisbury
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