Interview: Rebecca Prichard on Charged

Interview: Rebecca Prichard on Charged

09 November, 2010
by: Naima Khan

Naima Khan talks to playwright Rebecca Prichard about her new play Dream Pill, sex trafficking and getting it all across on stage.

This week Clean Break theatre company present Charged, a collection of six short plays by six writers about women in the criminal justice system. Clean Break, who usually commission only one play a year, will fill all manner of spaces at Soho Theatre and allow the audience to move around the building to see each story unfold.

As dress rehearsals begin in Soho, I put in a call to Rebecca Prichard, writer of the much acclaimed Yard Gal, to hear about her new play Dream Pill, the story of two child prostitutes. When I ask her about the title she says: IIn the play, these children are trying to work out what happened to them and what was real. With sex trafficking being so discrete, and with so little being done about it, they ask: did you dream us? or did we dream you?"

Though Charged is designed to provoke as well as entertain and get audiences thinking, Prichard and director Tessa Walker decided against using child actors. "We did consider it", she explains "but we felt the material is too extreme and we didn't know what impact it would have on the child. As a writer I was worried about not using children. I felt torn in a bit of an ethical conundrum because I thought if it was acted by adults, it would reduce the impact. But we've found two actors who somehow seem to forget they are not actually children".

The actors in question are Danielle Vitalis and Samantha Pearl who play two children as they are taken from Nigeria and forced into prostitution. It's an extreme situation but one, as Prichard found, that's not that unusual in Edo State, Nigeria. "I read a report in a Nigerian newspaper," she says, "that said one in three girls has been approached with offers." It's an issue compounded by its unseen nature in Western and developed countries.

Prichard notes the ongoing debate in the UK about the extent of trafficking: "It feels quite fraught with people who have different agendas and that's not at all helpful to people who are genuinely suffering. People have said it's a feminist agenda, that it's trying to present prostitution as violent. But you only have to look at source countries, where people are being trafficked from. Trafficking globally is massive. It shouldn't be a cliché to say it's modern day slavery."

One of the biggest challenges Prichard faces with Dream Pill is marrying the overarching political issues with the personal stories of her characters. But as a playwright, she points out, the characters are her main concern. "It's important not to dehumanise and objectify them," she says. "You've got to move an audience, so that they want to find out what's going on and so that they do question it."

Rebecca also points out that, in light of such widespread social trauma, the policy-makers can't be forgotten: "IMF policies contribute to it. They create a commodification of women and children on an industrial scale and I don't know how we've allowed this to happen."

Dream Pill will run alongside five other plays as part of Charged at Soho Theatre until November 27th.

Naima Khan