HARD -Review- Laurels, Whitley Bay

Hard

Laurels, Whitley Bay

Sex work is always newsworthy, eyeball-grabbing, we can’t tear our attention away. Often it is presented in art and literature as simultaneously glamorous and sleazy in a sensational salacious fashion. A good example is the film Last Night in Soho (not the subject of this review). But what these portrayals have in common is they feel unreal, not of our normal world, far removed from everyday experience.

HARD by Alison Stanley, at the Laurels, Whitley Bay, feels different: intimate, humane and instantly relatable.

I hadn’t been to the recently opened Laurels before. I’d walked past the door, in a parade of small shops on Whitley Road, and not noticed. The theatre is upstairs, and it struck me how similar fringe theatre venues and sex work premises are. Often improvised from not-quite-suitable spaces, a plain black backdrop and low lighting cover a multitude of sins. Unlike their glamorous West End showcases, these places can create an intimate and emotionally powerful experience.

HARD is narrated by writer-performer(and Spikemike reviewer) Alison Stanley, the story of sex worker Zee and how she almost falls into the work through force of circumstance, based on the real-life memoir of a Tyneside sex worker. Alison’s stage presence is so warm and funny, it is impossible not to be drawn into Zee’s story. 

Zee has an ailing father to support and is fed up with low-paid, exploitative work at a supermarket, so when she hears there’s better money to be made from a chatline, she gives it a try. And things progress from there… HARD romps us through, as Zee learns ‘on the job’ about fetishes, domination-submission, and the price of a tin of beans.

Even when touching on the darker side of sex work, the hypocrisy of punters who are happy to use their services but treat sex workers as worthless and even objects of violence, the tone never descends into mawkish voyeurism. This is very much a story from the sex workers’ point of view: they do not see themselves as victims in need of rescuing.

Alison Stanley as Zee holds the whole show together with enormous wit and warmth. She is ably supported by her cast of fellow sex workers, Emily Payne, Rebecca Corbett and Maggie Martin, who bring real humanity to their performance. I was astonished to learn that these are not all professional actors.

The male characters, punters  played by Steve Udale, Cameron Fraser and Connor Haley, and Zee’s miserable and hypocritical father, are less sympathetic. They are mostly comically ridiculous, embodying the dafter side of fetishes (though for the practitioners deeply serious). You knew that tin of beans would come in somewhere along the line. Rod Glenn as the father comes over as cantankerously demanding and his double standards about the source of Zee’s income, which he’s quite happy to benefit from, quite despicable.

A surprisingly hilarious take on a much-misunderstood industry; check out HARD’s touring dates, and watch out for any more work from Alison Stanley, either as writer or performer, with a big heart and a cheeky mouth.

Gerry Byrne