Teenager Marija is so full of longing for her life to really begin and for the world to find a use for her that she feels she will burst. But life in her small Lithuanian village offers few prospects beyond unemployment and poverty. Then her uncle arrives bearing gifts and the promise of a job as a beautician in Vilnius, and in a blink Marija has become Lola and is being trafficked to work in Copenhagen's sex industry.
Based on interviews and case studies, Nina Larissa Bassett's one-woman play turns the experiences of the many women who are trafficked through Europe to work as sex slaves into the story of one woman as she sits mute and traumatised in a Copenhagen police cell. She has lost her name, her identity, her family, her home, her country and her dignity. She is nothing but a body for men to use. The authorities merely see her as an illegal immigrant who must be deported; the gangs who run this modern-day slave trade treat her as a commodity to be bought and sold.
In terms of stagecraft, this is a relatively unsophisticated piece of theatre with some rudimentary physical work and awkward moments as actor Iben Hendel Philipsen flips between 19 different roles. If you saw Abi Morgan's Sex Traffic on TV, this production won't tell you anything you don't already know about the horrors that await girls like Marija, but it's a story that is surely worth telling again and again.
This is a show that transcends its own theatrical limitations. It sends you out of the theatre choked up and outraged by the knowledge that, if it were our teenage daughters who were being trafficked to eastern Europe, we wouldn't just stand by and let it happen.
· Until August 27. Box office: 0131-228 1404.
