A young woman arrives at a London airport with a new jacket, a £10 note, a small suitcase and a passport. Before she's quite aware what is happening, her passport is missing and she's in a car. England, she thought, would be green, like a picture book, polite, a "high moral society". She is raped in the car, and raped another five times at her new home. Over the next few weeks she is moved from London to Leicester, then Manchester, then Plymouth, being raped five, eight, 10 times a day. Before too many weeks have passed, she has been raped 1,500 times. Bearing in mind £1,500 was paid for her, that's £1 per rape.
There are horrifying statistics behind this show by the Paper Birds, a young, all-female theatre company based in Leeds. And, as the performers admit, the stats all but erase the personalities of the women behind them. "It was as if these women didn't exist," they confess mournfully. The company seem equally aware of the impossibility of dealing adequately with sex slavery in a piece of devised physical theatre that is as concerned with beauty as it is violence and squalor. Every so often, you wonder whether the show isn't too aesthetically pleasing: the clothes the trio wear are so pretty, the music played on stage by Shane Durrant is so romantic. But then the women hurl themselves to the floor in a simulation of being raped, and watching them turns your stomach.
The story is incomplete – we never learn, for instance, where the women come from, or how they were cheated into the sex trade. But how could it be otherwise? And there is something very clever about the way scenes are repeated and fractured: it gives a stronger impression of the reality of these women's lives than a straightforward story could. In a Thousand Pieces is a show full of questions, anger, horror and sadness – and glimpses of beauty that are as troubling as they are a relief.
