Emma Thompson Presents: Fair Trade

When your rights, your freedom and your control over your body are taken away, perhaps the one thing you can cling to is your name. When two women slowly chalk “SAMAI” and “ELENA” onto a wall, they are making a powerful statement of their identity. But these are not their real names. Their names had to be changed; this is the true story of the victims of sex trafficking. 

For Elena, growing up in a small Albanian village, London meant excitement. For Samai, who survived the conflict in Darfur, it meant freedom. But in London their names are rubbed off the wall, and replaced with a tally of men who abuse them. The men believe “a slut’s a slut, doesn’t matter where they're from.” The play insists that wider society colludes with this view, accepting the myth that these women have chosen prostitution. 

The story is allowed to tell itself, with minimal staging and effects. One exception is a scene in which a fairy godmother promises to make Cinderella’s dreams come true if she goes to another country where many princes await her. The comparison is so obvious as to be unnecessary, and it is a jarring intrusion into an otherwise organic plot.

It is difficult to make a polemic into a work of art. The issue of sex trafficking is skillfully explored by producer Emma Thompson, and the acting superb, but the overall effect is educational rather than artistic. Nevertheless, it is a powerful demonstration of the human suffering contained in thousands of brown government files, which are revealed when the wall finally comes down.