See Me Now: the show exposing the everyday lives of sex workers

A new verbatim theatre piece stars teachers, consultants and cleaners who have all earned a living through the sex trade. The creators, including a dominatrix, discuss a show that’s about love and work

Source: Theguardian.com.


UK – LONDON – Being a sex worker is my perfect job. I have so much creative and intellectual freedom. My dominatrix persona is my ideal version of myself: confident, in control and highly trained,” says Governess Elizabeth.

Elizabeth got into sex work after she dropped out of a master’s degree in social care and found herself in urgent need of an income. She has since started another master’s, this time in psychotherapy. (“All my essays are about sex,” she says.) She is one of 11 sex workers who will be appearing, under assumed or working names, on stage at London’s Young Vic in See Me Now, a new show created and performed by people who have experience of working in the sex industry. It has been made in collaboration with writer Molly Taylor and director Mimi Poskitt of Look Left Look Right.

“It’s rare in theatre to work with a group of people who want to be anonymous,” says Poskitt, explaining that while everyone involved is happy to be on stage, they each have different boundaries and extents to which they are prepared to have their identities exposed. “We have to respect that,” she says. “The difference between working with this cast and professional actors is that Molly and I are constantly thinking not just about what is best for the show but what is best for the group and its dynamic, a group of which we are part.” A counsellor comes in once a week.

The cast members are male, female and transgender. They come from all sorts of backgrounds. Some have had other careers, or still earn money in other industries: they are teachers, IT consultants, cleaners and musicians. When I sit in on rehearsals, it’s immediately apparent that being a sex worker comes with many of the same irritations, necessities and daily repetitions that come with any job: commuting, emailing, waiting around, and making sure that you have all the essential tools of the trade. See Me Now is about far more than just sex.

“An awful lot of this show,” says Poskitt, is about “everyday life. In fact there is probably as much about sexuality and gender as there is about sex, and an awful lot of it is about love.” Sex workers are mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, too, and shouldn’t be defined by their jobs any more than the rest of the population.

Elizabeth wanted to take part because she was tired of people telling her that she should “feel exploited and abused for being a sex worker” when she doesn’t feel like that at all: “There is so much moralising around sex.” She runs a training school for those who would like to follow in her footsteps as a dominatrix. “I don’t fit the stereotype of the trafficked victim,” she says. She started training as a mistress after having a partner who was submissive. “A lot of it is about learning different techniques. You can be really creative, but it’s also about learning about psychology.”

Her other reason for taking part is that she wants to see a change in the law, which she says currently makes sex workers easy targets for abuse. “The law demands that we work on our own, and it makes us vulnerable.” She has developed strategies to keep herself safe. “Clients have to jump through hoops to get anywhere near me.” But she also knows that not everyone is able to protect themselves as she does. “You have to be resilient and you have to take care of yourself and practise self-preservation. I may see some clients three times a month, but I am not their girlfriend. You have to be able to separate professional sexual activity from loving sexual activity.”

See Me Now is part of the Young Vic’s Taking Part programme, an impressive strand of participatory activity engaging with young people and the theatre’s local communities. See Me Now, says Imogen Brodie, director of Taking Part, comes with no agenda on the part of the Young Vic. “It belongs to the performers, not to us. And the people involved are all different with very different stories. Some, like Elizabeth, feel empowered by what they do, and others feel they have been damaged by it.”

The project began more than 18 months ago, when Poskitt was sharing a flat with a friend who was involved in outreach projects for sex workers (many of which have since had their funding cut), and became interested in opening a space where they could tell their stories. “We read an awful lot in the media about sex workers, but very seldom hear directly from them,” says Poskitt, who argues that the stigma around sex work ensures they remain marginalised and frequently demonised.

See Me Now was initiated as a way to provide a safe space for sex workers to meet, talk and create work, in a project that ran alongside Joe Hill-Gibbins’ revival of Measure for Measure with Romola Garai in the main house in 2015. Shakespeare’s play looks at hypocritical attitudes towards sex through the character of Angelo, who is charged with cleaning up the vice-ridden Vienna yet turns predatory abuser of the virginal Isabella. The idea was that each show would inform the other. There was no thought, at that stage, that See Me Now would become a fully-fledged public production. But the participants were keen to keep in touch (sex workers are often isolated, and the project was a way of making contact with others) and take what they had created further. Hence its current incarnation as See Me Now, in which everyone is being paid to create and perform.

For Poskitt and Taylor, working on the show has been invigorating but has also involved challenges. “It’s a tricky process but also a humbling one,” says Taylor. “This is not the kind of work that you can create in a hurry. You need to create a climate of respect and, most importantly, of trust. And you have to be prepared to listen.” Over time, she says, the performers became more willing to share material that initially they were reticent about.

Taylor had previously worked with Poskitt on Look Left Look Right pieces including The Neighbourhood Project for the Bush theatre, and has always been alert to the ethical responsibilities of taking other people’s stories and editing them for performance. She’s well aware that, while verbatim theatre might appear to come straight from the horse’s mouth, the editing process shapes the material and affects how it is received by an audience.

A case in point might be another play about sex workers: Alecky Blythe’s verbatim play The Girlfriend Experience, based on interviews with women in a Bournemouth brothel, which the Young Vic staged in 2009. It was as jolly and full of double entendres as a Carry On movie, and made you wonder as much about what had been excluded as what had been included.

This is very different. “Mimi and I joke that what we are creating is ‘post-verbatim theatre’,” says Taylor, “because I’m not taking other people’s words and stories and using them for my own vision or to make my own points, as a writer might sometimes do on another project. Instead, it is more as if I’m holding their words for them and feeding them back to them, so they always retain the authorship. It’s not playwriting by committee, but I present drafts and they provide really detailed feedback, and we go back and forth like that.” As if to demonstrate, when we meet she is carrying lines cut out of the script that she has been rearranging like furniture in a room and will be taking back to show the cast.

“You have to be supple as a writer to work in this way, and Mimi and I couldn’t do it if we hadn’t built up a long-term relationship with everyone over the last 18 months. Because we’ve built it over time, and because we invited people into the project with no need for them to justify or defend or account for themselves in any way, what you get in performance is a real warmth and intimacy, because nothing is being concealed.” Except the participants’ real names.

• See Me Now is at the Young Vic, London, from 11 February to 4 March.

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