Too close for comfort

Two times every day this August, a young Nigerian girl will be taken across town on a bus. Excited by the inestimable possibilities of her new life in Edinburgh, fascinated by the privilege and opportunity she sees as she bumps down Princes Street, catching glimpses of Calton Hill and Arthur’s seat, she will chat and giggle impatiently with her elegant travel partner – "auntie", as she calls her. She will hop off the bus and into one of Edinburgh’s stylish Edwardian terraces. Once inside, she will be raped, taken down to the shuttered-up basement, and forced to work as a sex slave.

In Cora Bissett’s acclaimed play, Roadkill, the young girl, Mary, will be watched—on the bus; in the tenement; in the claustrophobic basement—by fifteen audience members. As footsteps tread the pavement above, Roadkill seeks to reveal, with harrowing realism, the hidden reality of sex-trafficking lurking behind some of Edinburgh’s gentile façades: “I wanted to make this piece to bring it home to people that it’s not just something that happens in London, or in Europe or America. It’s right on our doorstep,” she says.

It is also, says Bissett, an extraordinarily “zeitgesty” issue – and she’s not wrong. A crop of writers and performers across the comedy and theatre programmes this year appear to have launched an uncoordinated artistic assault on the sex trade: “It’s really on people’s minds. Maybe because it needs to be. Maybe there’s an urgency,” she reasons. But it’s Bissett’s play that has made the biggest impact, becoming one of the main talking points at this year’s Fringe. An idea that has “sort of been in [her] head for five years”, Roadkill has already garnered much praise for the profound effect created by its close-quarters theatrical experience. “It seems to be having the impact that I sought to create,” she says.

I meet director, actor and—when she finds time—musician Cora Bissett during the mid-afternoon lull in the Pleasance Dome. It’s an odd rendezvous for an artist who has achieved greater Fringe success across town at the Traverse – notably playing the high-flying lawyer in David Grieg’s acclaimed Midsummer (a play with songs) last year. Nonetheless, her striking shock of blonde hair—now cut short—is glamorous and distinctive, and within half an hour she has been recognised. One perhaps wouldn’t call it fame just yet, but it’s a useful reminder of what a big fish Bissett is in the Scottish theatre pond.

It’s a reputation well-deserved, and Bissett already has a clutch of awards in the cabinet: 2007 saw her pick up the Arches Award for new directors; 2009 brought the gong for Best Stage Actress at the Fringe. Roadkill has already been handed a Herald Angel and a Total Theatre award this year, and is shortlisted for Amnesty’s Freedom of Expression award. Bissett says she's “really really delighted” about Roadkill’s success so far: “it’s lovely to get recognition for the show and as an artist.” But much more than that, she’s “delighted that it has been spoken about so much and shared so much.”

One very quickly gets a sense of Bissett’s genuine commitment to challenging the exploitation of women. For Bissett this is not a disaffected artistic response to an issue that might appear to be, as she puts it, “something out there”, but rather a response forged in an experience “about three years ago” when, through a charity, she put up an asylum-seeker in her flat.

“She confided her story in me,” Bisset recalls, “and I felt at that point that it had become a matter of urgency. It was something that I knew about, but meeting an actual human being in the flesh who had been through it just has a profound effect. I think it would have on anybody. When you hear it first hand, yeah, it has a huge impact on you”.

That experience not only provided the catalyst for the play, but also the germ of an idea for the powerful staging: “I almost wanted the audience to experience what I’d experienced, that close proximity. So that wasn’t a gimmick or an add on, like ‘Hey, let’s do site-specific’. I really thought, ‘How can I as closely recreate the profound effect it had on me for an audience?’”

Bisset’s epiphany was followed by a long period of research – data from the Scottish Refugee Council and the Poppy Project, a trip with scriptwriter Stef Smith to Italy to spend time with an anti-trafficking charity, copious case studies. She is keen to point out that, at the end of this, the story is “an amalgamation of many many stories”, rather than a tale that can be traced back to one individual. Sadly, though, “many of the stories are very similar.” The result is a piece which zones in on the “particularly African dynamic” of the young girl and the glamorous but ultimately deceptive older madam, played in Roadkill by Mercy Ojelade and Adura Onashile. 

“We worked a lot on development with the actors, and really tried to make them complex characters because I thought "it won’t have the impact I want it to have if it’s just about a baddie and a victim,” says Bissett, adding that, as frequently happens, “the older woman, she’s been trafficked as well. She’s a victim of that whole cycle of abuse. So we’ve tried to build in her complexities as well.”

But for all its complexities, fewer people will see Roadkill this month than will watch one night of Australian comic Jim Jeffries’s Fringe show. The rest of the run is completely sold out and, come September, the set will return to being just another New Town flat. While admitting to being frustrated that more people cannot experience the literal and symbolic underground world she has crafted, Bissett is gambling that “the impact is so big on the people that do see it, that the ripple effect is great.”

Undoubtedly, this ripple is in no small part down to Bissett’s refusal to try to educate an audience (“If I wanted to give a lecture on trafficking statistics then I’d give a lecture on that!”), opting instead to move them. Some have left in floods of tears. But is this really enough given the scale and reach of the abuse she documents? I wonder if she has had doubts as to whether theatre, particularly on this scale, has the power to make a difference. She is unequivocal: “Yeah, absolutely. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have doubts.”

“I so desperately wanted to be responsible in what I was doing, and not be exploitative of someone’s story. So, yes, I asked myself those questions a lot. But fundamentally I kept coming back to the point that I know I can’t change the world; I know I’m not going to solve this with one play. That would be naïve and arrogant and silly. But what I can do is get people to really connect with that character, to not see it as ‘other’.

“So whenever I had the doubts I just thought, ‘no’, I’ve got to bring this home to people, I’ve got to make people understand that this is around us.

"Now, what are we going to do about it?”