The Girlfriend Experience

After a sold-out run last year at The Royal Court, The Girlfriend Experience is back for a revival at The Young Vic. Alecky Blythe’s docudrama is based on the real-life conversations of women working in a brothel in Bournemouth. They offer ‘the girlfriend experience’ – non-threatening sexual encounters for the lonely, the decrepit, the weird and the occasionally just plain unpleasant.

The show’s verbatim scenes veer between the surreal minutiae of workplace small-talk, direct confidences and casually outrageous sexual frankness. The mundane and the comic jostle against an underscore of muted disappointment, with the odd shocking lurch into scarifying darkness. It’s a bit like watching Dinnerladies intercut with flashes of hardcore porn. It’s endearing, but eye-opening and unflinching.

The cast are a wonderful collection of painfully real women: courageously inelegant and commandingly matter-of-fact. Debbie Chazen is Tessa, small-businesswoman and single-mum, good-hearted, world-weary and indomitably cheery. Beatie Edney is riveting as auburn-haired Susie, whose wittered platitudes and delusions of social acceptance imperfectly mask creeping loneliness and grief. And Lu Corfield turns in a performance of show-stopping comic horror as tattooed, cigarette-burned, cider-swigging Poppy, jaw-droppingly vulnerable in her vacuous, generous, shambolic unconcern for her own welfare.

Blythe’s confident, unpatronising editing allows her subjects to speak for themselves, reflecting on the risks and rewards of exposing their lives to public view. Her method of having performers in headphones, through which are piped the voices of their real-world alter-egos, may be a mite exhibitionist, but does serve as a marker of the difference between what we’re seeing onstage and its original sources and context.

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this show much, but The Girlfriend Experience – unpretentious and funny – thoroughly overturned my squeamish preconceptions. Tackling still-taboo subjects with respect, warmth and realism, it’s the most honest, educational and unexpectedly life-affirming play I’ve seen in a very long time.