Calculated game of risk shows the lives of sex workers

Each night, Grace Dyas’s play features five male volunteers who react to various real-life scenarios, writes Colette Sheridan.

Dynamic and unpredictable is how director Grace Dyas describes The Game, a play about prostitution that uses the experiences of women working in prostitution and those of women who have left it.

The Game, part social commentary, part experiment, features five different male volunteers every night, who, unscripted, react to the two actors who re-enact scenarios that sex workers have shared with Dyas in the process of putting the show together.

The men are not from the audience but are from men’s groups such as men’s sheds.

Also, a call was put out on social media looking for men to be participants in a piece of activism.

“The guys don’t have to say anything about their own experiences or their own views. They’re asked to stand in for the men in the women’s stories,” says Dyas.

This Theatre Club production premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2015.

“The reaction to The Game was very interesting. People were very moved by it and emotional. Some had tears on their faces.

"We knew the material was affecting but we weren’t expecting it to be affective in that way. It surprised us. I guess we thought it was going to be more divisive.

“The fact that people were moved by it was better for us. I think when you’re angry, there’s not much energy in that. But when you’re moved on a guttural level, you empathise on a human level.”

When the play was first performed, there was a lot of debate around the potential of introducing the Nordic model in Ireland where the buyer of sex is criminalised and the seller is decriminalised.

Just last month, the Sexual Offences Bill, criminalising the purchaser was passed in the Dáil.

“Some of the women we worked with are thrilled about the legislation. It’s a life time’s work for them. Others that we worked with are livid and are going to challenge it legally.”

A therapeutic facilitator is present at every performance to guide the men through their participation and to help them afterwards.

“So there’s lots of things we had to put in place because the whole thing is unpredictable. There’s a certain psychological risk with the work, so we have to really safeguard that.

"In the process of making the show, there were times when we wondered if we could actually do it, but thankfully, with the help of therapists and different advisers, we were able to find a way.”

The aim of the show is to make audiences more aware of the issues that some sex workers have to deal with. Dyas says that men have a choice.

“That’s not always the case for the women in these situations. For example, she cites women who have been trafficked into prostitution.”

For Dyas, the show asks more questions than it answers.

“That’s the best place to be as an artist. I’ve had the experience of being very dogmatic about certain issues that we worked on and my work hasn’t been that good as a result.

“Audiences don’t want to see something that’s preachy. I went through different experiences with The Game. I got to a place where I don’t really know what legislation can do.

"Obviously, the legislation is helpful in the sense that it’s changing social consciousness. But there are bigger scarier issues.

“If there was no patriarchy and no capitalism, then there’d be nothing wrong with (sex work). But we do live in a world of patriarchy and capitalism.

"One of the key things we’re saying in this show is that there is no way for both sides to be happy with any law. In The Game, some people lose and some people gain. That’s the depressing fact about it.”

Theatre Club has, in the past, made a show called Heroin and its new show is about the IRA. For Dyas, social activism and theatre go hand in hand. “I don’t think I’d be a good activist if I wasn’t an artist.”

• The Game is at Cork’s Everyman from March 21-22.