There is a good show to be written about the 10-year campaign to decriminalise prostitution by two members of the Hampshire Women’s Institute. This, however, is emphatically not it. With book, songs and lyrics by Barbara Jane Mackie, the musical Rumpy Pumpy! seems torn between cheering on the cause and pruriently exploiting the idea of two middle-class women championing sex workers. The writing is of a crudity that makes the average Carry On movie look like William Congreve.
The play starts from fact. In 2006, Jean Johnson and Shirley Landels bravely advocated to their local WI branch the creation of “safe, legal spaces for working girls”. They also undertook a whistle-stop tour of Amsterdam, Nevada and New Zealand in search of the perfect brothel. But the real story, I would have thought, lay in their battles to overcome reflex prejudice, because their crusade was never endorsed by the WI nationally. I would also like to hear about the impact of their convictions on their family and friends. Instead, we get a procession of lewd jokes and songs that don’t so much advance the action as seriously impede it.
The tone is set early on when the madam of a Portsmouth brothel cheerily tells the WI ladies: “You bring the tea and we’ll bring the crumpets.” The sex workers themselves, who include an off-duty cop, teacher and law student, largely converse in double entendres. (Told that a particular client has come early, one of them replies: “They often do.”) The songs maintain the note of smutty joviality. At one point, a trio of working girls launch into a number that tells us: “Boobs, tubes, jellies and lubes / All do the trick if you’ve problems with your prick.” Somehow, I don’t think that will make it into the Great British Songbook.
It would be pointless to itemise all the show’s absurdities, which include a butch female detective, who denounces the brothel madam as “a whoremonger and antichrist”, turning out to be susceptible to female charm. Instead, I started thinking about how theatre has treated the subject of sex work. “The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage,” has always struck as me one of the most resonant lines from the brothel scene in Pericles. Jean Genet in The Balcony ingeniously used a bordello to mirror a world of political illusion. And Alecky Blythe’s 2008 play The Girlfriend Experience employed verbatim techniques to capture the sadness and self-delusion of a group of middle-aged Bournemouth sex workers.
All told us more than this piece, which, given its naval dockyard setting, might be more accurately titled Rompy Pompey. Louise Jameson and Tricia Deighton as the campaigners, Linda Nolan as the madam and Sally Frith as a vivacious sex worker, do their best. The total effect, however, is of a noble cause relentlessly trivialised.
• At Union theatre, London, until 19 November. Box office: 020-7261 9876.
