The skin game... Trade, Pleasance Theatre and on tour

This is a story told from inside out, a narrative swirled around a single character looking back from a pivotal moment as she explains herself to an audience close enough to see the whites of her eyes, the sick on her shirt, the blood on her trousers. There’s no place for the audience to hide in the Pleasance’s downstairs theatre and crammed in on three sides the audience were simply outnumbered and overwhelmed by the three players on stage as we looked into their eyes and saw only Sarajevo, Yugoslavia and the London nobody will admit to knowing.

 I didn’t know until I bought the book after the show that this was Katarina Novkovic’s professional stage debut, the second show of the week long run at the Pleasance… her second ever gig. She is so strikingly assured you’d never know it, switching the mood and holding the play together with forceful assurity, completely within character, pulling us into the moments. She is joined in this seemingly effortless alchemy by Eleanor Roberts who’d been in the play’s debut at Central St Martins and the run at last year’s Vault Festival, and Ojan Genc (recently seen in the excellent Slow Horses). Between them the three play many characters and create a dramatic experience that is both exhausting, humbling and, in parts, very funny.

 Yes, Trade is remarkably varied in tone for a play about human trafficking but as Katarina’s character, Jana, counts the tens, hundreds and thousands of days she’s been away from her home and family, she shows much resilient humanity and her jokes are not just about breaking the mood as adapting to horrendous circumstance and enabling her to survive. 

Katarina Novkovic (all photos from Ali Painter)

Written by Ella Dorman-Gajic, who is of Serbian and Austrian heritage, Trade is dedicated to a single story out of the millions around the world who are the victims of modern slavery and part of the play’s script sales goes to Unseen, a charity supporting such victims in the UK. The numbers in slavery are greater than at any point in history and estimates put over 100,000 people in this country in this position including many in forced sexual exploitation, 99% of which are women and girls who, in the cases of Jana and her sister Katarine (Eleanor), are of similar age to my daughter.

The play doesn’t take any easy routes to making its points though, this is a fierce entertainment that pulls you in and leaves you breathless by the end when Jana’s full journey is finally revealed. It’s not a binary world by any means and the worst of it is almost unmentioned as we focus on Jana’s head stretched to keep above the swirling depravity of her daily experience. 

The play opens with her every inch the “professional” as she later says, taking a call from some punter for one of the girls she helps manage. There’s a loud knock on the door and the police shouting through threats as she smiles us back to her teenage years working in the family grocers with her mother and younger sister. Jana is smart, almost fluent in English as she helps to tutor her sister. 

Katarina Novkovic and Ojan Genc

She meets a boy, Stefan (Ojan) who has come in looking for potatoes and the two bond over a cabbage, as you do. Their romance develops and the two plan to go to London, a place she has always dreamed of, plans are made and the two head off, Jana promising to see her sister soon. Once they reach Sarajevo, Jana soon discovers that everything is not at all as she was led to believe along with those of us who probably had too large a supper at the Depot Deli next door.

The moments of the first assault are horrifically quiet as the play lets our imaginations do the hard work as Jana’s bright white clothing is covered in a splash of deep red blood, she loses her virginity to the first of many men. It’s brutal and her casually resigned exposition only serves to underline how her life has been viciously removed from her control….

From there onto the UK via the sea, a gut punch given recent announcements, these are indeed some of our “invaders” … Once in London Jana’s routine of cleaning and sex work gets into a deadening groove and her escape is blocked off by her handler, Nicola (Ojan again), remind her that they know where her family and especially her sister lives. She’s trapped and yet resilient enough to find a means to survive within this horror; playing a version of herself that meets these men in terms of cunning, refusing the help of a journalist because she knows it will get her nowhere. 

The deeper she goes, the deeper she gets but there will be a reckoning… won’t there? Survival is complicated.

Eleanor Roberts 

IThankYou rating: **** Superbly directed by Maddy Corner, this is a play that pulls you into another world and continuously wrong-foots expectations and it will haunt me for days. Unsurprisingly it won an OFFIE Award and there will be many such garlands for this cast and this crew in the years ahead. 

Props too to stage designers Natasha Gatwood, Timothy Kelly and Kristina Kapilin for an impactful backdrop and artistically integrated captions that make Trade accessible to both d/Deaf audiences and native Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian speakers.

Trade runs at Pleasance Theatre until 25th March, Full details are on the Pleasance site.

It then moves on, click the links for ticket information: 

Nottingham Nonsuch on 1st April

Exeter Phoenix on 6th April, 

Birmingham Old Joint Stock from 7-9 April and

Norwich Arts Centre on 13th April. 

 

The Unseen website is here to find out more about modern slavery and human trafficking in this country; it’s here and there are people like Jana working throughout our economy, only a few paces away from our daily normalities, if we're lucky.

You can also order the Trade paperback from Salamander Street publishing with 10% of the sales going to support Unseen.