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The Girlfriend Experience

The Young Vic, Inner London
From: Friday, 24th July 2009
To: Saturday, 15 August 2009

Our Review:

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Synopsis

Tessa has set up a business; a brothel by the sea where mature women specialise in the Girlfriend Experience, a surprisingly caring and sympathetic service. As the women stoically strive to make a living in a competitive market, their personal lives start to crumble. Will they ever have loving relationships outside work and enjoy being girlfriends themselves? This play is created entirely from edited conversations recorded inside a real brothel.

Our Review:

Jo Caird - 30 July 2009

Prostitution is a challenging topic to explore in theatre: it is shrouded in a veil that is part sleaze and part glamour, is full of contradictions and is highly vulnerable to damaging stereotyping. Playwright Alecky Blythe however successfully negotiates these difficulties and offers us a captivating and insightful vision of this usually hidden world.

The process that brought The Girlfriend Experience to the stage was a highly original one. Blythe spent a year visiting at a prostitutes' parlour, talking to the middle-aged women who worked there and collecting more than 100 hours of audio recordings. Rather than working from a written verbatim script the actors mimic the voices on the edited tapes as they are played live via headphones during rehearsals and performances. The effect of this device – at times somewhat distracting in itself – is to ensure that the actors represent the prostitutes as they actually were in those moments, rather than layering t...

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