No big deal ... Billie Piper in The Secret Diary of a Call Girl.
Over the past few weeks it has been impossible to avoid the barrage of publicity for ITV2's The Secret Diary of a Call Girl - the new adaptation of the Belle de Jour blog-turned-publishing sensation, which purports to offer the real-life confessions of a high-class working girl. It was equally difficult to miss the tone of high disapproval in the show's reviews.
But none of it should have been shocking to regular theatregoers. British theatre has a long and illustrious history of condoning prostitution, both on and off the stage. Consider the theatres of Shakespeare's day: they had reputations little better than houses of ill repute, where audiences could pick up a punk as well as watch one on stage (albeit played by a boy). Indeed, the Rose theatre was a brothel when Philip Henslowe took out his lease on it. Still doubtful? Consider Measure for Measure: Angelo, the villain of the piece, spends the play trying to close brothels and imprison sex workers. Or look at Falstaff's devotion to Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly. And how about Sir Walter Whorehound and co in Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside?
Fast-forward to the Restoration and the stage is once again awash with prostitutes - both fictional and actual. As well as bringing women to the stage in a series of scandalously racy dramas, it is generally acknowledged that many of the female actors of the period also sold themselves off the stage into the bargain. Indeed, the period continues to exert a fascination over modern playwrights' imaginations - Stephen Jeffreys' Restoration-set play The Libertine conjures a vision of the theatre as a seedily glamorous netherworld of sexual licence and prostitution.
Even after the moral censure of the Victorian age, George Bernard Shaw was able to offer a deliberately "shocking" portrayal of a woman who had profited vastly from "immoral earnings" in Mrs Warren's Profession. The strictures of the Lord Chamberlain effectively made further discussion of the subject impossible for much of the 20th century. By the time the power of that office had been destroyed, the same liberals who had argued for its discontinuation had established an irreproachable feminist orthodoxy - at least within the arts - which militated against the presentation of the prostitute as anything but the victim of a male patriarchal oppression.
This ideology still holds. Last year the Edinburgh Fringe seemed to be swamped with plays about people-trafficking and sex workers. Although more recently Recorded Delivery's excellent new work-in-progress The Girlfriend Experience, as shown during the Royal Court's Rough Cuts season, offered a less sermonising take on the subject.
Until The Secret Diary of a Call Girl, prostitution in contemporary narratives had been painstakingly portrayed as utterly horrific. Secret Diary... reclaims a long tradition of fictional happy hookers. Kathryn Flett suggested "it's effectively a recruitment ad for a new generation of silly girls ... who just might now book a Brazilian wax at the prospect of such apparently easy money." Funny how such sentiments never seem to crop up in reviews of Henry IV. Is it that theatre audiences can be trusted to be less naïve?
The alternative is that whilst Secret Diary of a Call Girl implicitly poses some very uncomfortable questions about contemporary morality, we theatregoers have for a long time been prepared to overlook the fact that until very late in the day, some of our brightest and best playwrights took part in, glossed and promoted an ongoing, unacceptable abuse of women.
