Sold (Hull)

The evening begins with great promise. John Godber, writing with his wife Jane Thornton, has taken on a challenging subject far from his usual comedies of Yorkshire life. Sold, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, focuses on 21st century sex trafficking. At the outset cast members sing a moving unaccompanied version of “Amazing Grace” (by the slaver John Newton, of course – a clever touch), then soberly recount estimates of the scale of the current sex trade. With Pip Leckenby’s set dominated by images of Euro bank notes, we anticipate a powerfully expressionist indictment of modern slavery.

Sadly, it never materialises. Joshua Richards, playing the central character with pleasing warmth and restraint, suggests that all the events we see are just possibilities – a “let’s imagine” scenario – but, when he finishes the play with “You could say none of this is true”, we’re there before him.

Ray, a remarkably unworldly investigative reporter, decides to do an expose on the sex trade. His television producer friend suggests that he needs an inside informant – a good idea since Ray seems to know very little about the trade. He is, for instance, astonished at the import of sex-workers for the World Cup in Germany, as all the characters are – they should read the papers. Ray finds Anja, a young Moldovan woman forced into prostitution in London, and eventually pays her debts and moves her up to Hull. Trouble inevitably ensues, building to an unlikely melodramatic ending – admittedly, only presented in “What if…?” terms.

The Act 2 arguments say nothing about the problem of trafficking. Ray is simply extremely silly: if you spend £20,000 on helping an attractive young woman, accommodate her in a flat near you and only then tell your wife, there’s a fair chance she will take a dim view, whether the woman is from Chisinau or Chesterfield.

Too many of the characters are grotesques for the play to convince as drama or polemic, though Kasia Halpin impresses as Anja and Annmarie Hosell is nicely unaffected as Ray’s step-daughter.

A deft sense of pace can be taken for granted with any John Godber production, but even this slackens at times. Ironically, as he writes in the programme of the “challenge” of writing “something that isn’t funny”, the play works best in the humorous scenes, as when Ray tries to tell his wife that he might have made a mistake – at least I hope this is a humorous scene, the audience certainly thought so.

– Ron Simpson