Unprotected Everyman, Liverpool
Rockaby Barbican, London EC2
Ohio Impromptu Barbican, London EC2
The Everyman in Liverpool is living up to its name. Thanks to a new play, it is doing what theatres all over the country dream of: pulling in scores of first-time theatre-goers alongside loyal subscribers. Yet Unprotected hasn't got a Hollywood star and it isn't a theatrical re-warming of a movie: it's a piece of verbatim theatre - all of it drawn from interviews - which puts on stage the lives of women working as prostitutes in Liverpool.
Hanane Parry and Pauline Stephen were hacked to death by a punter in 2003. 'Ali', still working the streets, had a knife held to her, while her jaw and nose were smashed and 17 crosses burnt into her back: at the trial of her kidnapper, the judge said that the injuries were 'a hazard of the job'.
Members of the audience have heckled Unprotected, wailed at it, rushed out from it, and then rushed back to congratulate its actors; it has been applauded by mothers of the dead women and by working girls; the only people portrayed on stage who've been slow to identify themselves are the women's clients.
This is, clearly, a campaigning piece. It was prompted by Liverpool Council's proposal that a managed zone for street sex workers should be created; it was given more fuel by the government's clamp down in its national zero-tolerance strategy. But it isn't just bleeding-heart agit prop. The writers - Esther Wilson, John Fay, Tony Green and Lizzie Nunnery - who interviewed sources and edited the material, have gone to considerable lengths to ensure a range of opinion and crisp argument: there's a definitive summing-up of what makes zero-tolerance unenforceable and dangerous. This will change people's minds, and in unexpected ways: it turns out to be a play not just about sex, but about families and drugs and other addictions: 'Me baby become me addiction. I got clean,' Ali unforgettably explains.
Nina Raine's first-rate production brings everything home. The Gray Circle (who have been working on The Lord of the Rings in Toronto) provide video of a grand, gaudy, miserable Liverpool: a statuesque, black-and-white panorama which slowly closes in around the speakers; an alley flooded with red light; the park in which bits of the women's bodies were dumped. The line between decent people in their homes and bad girls on the streets is blurred, as cast members filter through the auditorium to the stage and actors who play grieving mothers in one act get raunchy and leathered-up in the next.
Neil Caple, who plays five parts, including government official and punter, caused the mother of one of the murdered girls to say she was glad that one of her daughter's last men wasn't a slime-ball. Pauline Daniels and Joan Kempson are impressive as the mothers. Leanne Best's Ali blazes with energetic intelligence: 'Know what I think,' she ironises about the guy who nearly killed her: 'I think he'd had a bad time with his mum.'
Much has been made of the influence of music hall on Samuel Beckett, but he doesn't usually pull in a rowdy audience. The short pieces - Beckett-ettes - that opened the Barbican's festival devoted to his work (this is his centenary year) were heard in an almost prayerful silence. In Rockaby and Ohio Impromptu - both first seen in 1981, eight years before the playwright's death - each gesture, sound effect and lighting change is choreographed with metronomic precision; the dramatist specifies the degree of polish on the wood of a chair and the moment when an eyelid should close. When a mobile phone went off - and on and on and on - it took some time to realise that it wasn't a contribution to the auditory texture.
The shifts in these plays are so tiny that watching them is like staring at the changes in a flame or wave. In Rockaby, a threnody in the form of a cradle song, a woman (a haunting Siân Phillips) sits alone on a dark stage. A recording of her voice describes the running down of a repetitive day and life. A light brightens and fades on her face. Occasionally, she nudges the commentary with a croak: 'More.' Sometimes she urges her rocking chair into activity. Eventually she stops. Ohio Impromptu (which has nothing impromptu about it) shows two men - long-haired, straight-faced - sitting like medieval carvings: one is silent but occasionally thumps the table with his fist; the other reads aloud from a book which talks of two characters bound together, one endlessly reading the same sad tale from a book.
These plays - ultimate examples of the paring down by which Beckett transformed ideas of theatrical performance - are teases. They are like Mobius strips: you can't tell what's on the inside and what's outside, what's action and what's reflection. Yet the after-images they leave are intense. Sometimes, though, you wish the audience weren't required to be such passive worshippers: perhaps they, too, should be given rocking chairs, then they could rock back.
