What does it take to become a prostitute? Youth, beauty, courage, sexual allure, a love of money, a need for hard drugs, an addiction to risk? None of these, according to this fascinating show written and performed by London sex workers. What prostitutes need is the right mindset: humane, adaptable, tolerant, altruistic. Sex work is one of the caring professions. And it attracts operatives of any age, creed or physical configuration. An elegant 67-year-old rent boy explains, with touching humour, that his clients tend to be married men who just happen to be interested in fellatio. ‘Will you put your penis inside my body?’ a shy punter once asked him. ‘Yes, that’s more or less what I do.’ He works in the afternoons. In the mornings he has a cleaning job.
Often the sex itself is peripheral. A dominatrix expresses pity for her alpha-male clients (City grandees and high-court judges), whose high-powered jobs leave them isolated at work, and surrounded by anxious faces and fawning attitudes. They seek respite by inverting their status from master to slave. So they hire her, a pantomime she-monster, to insult them, thrash them and spit on them, often in the lunch hour. The dominatrix has tips for women considering a career in S&M. Always get your slave to steam-clean the sex toys during the session. And carry nail scissors at all times in case he gets inextricably tangled in a leather harness.
The show is marred by some laborious staging effects towards the end, and the closing 20-minute section, where the sex workers deliver their philosophical banalities, deserves to be cut. But there are flashes of unconscious poetry here too. A middle-aged crack addict describes how she fell in love with a tormented young man.
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