| 19 August 2011
When I saw that Central School of Music and Drama was back at the Fringe after a couple of years’ absence, I knew I had to get a ticket to its graduate show. After all, in 2008 I was so moved by their alumni’s production The Boy from Centreville, about the Virginia Tech shootings, that I gave it five stars on this very site. This year’s topic sounded just as interesting – human trafficking.
I wasn’t disappointed. Devised theatre often creates exciting work, and verbatim theatre even more so. The fact that the words spoken are the genuine thoughts and emotions of real people makes the entire experience so much more immediate and honest. If one wants the facts of an issue to hit home hard, there is no better format.
The show is a series of interlinking vignettes, featuring a host of characters that somehow contrive to become individually memorable and, in many cases, hugely sympathetic. From the usual image of trafficked people – an Eastern-European stripper forced into prostitution – to a modern-day African house slave, from a Welsh teenager being groomed to a Romany mother who is in prison for trafficking children, few of the strands fail to hold the audience’s interest.
I was sad to see, however, that Sold follows a similar formula to that of The Boy from Centreville while lacking that show’s extraordinary visual flair. Possibly because the set was so much more impressive, the music more powerful and the elements of dance more judiciously used in that prior performance, I found this a little lacking. However, these are small complaints when set against the true achievement of this fascinating graduate piece, which will hopefully raise awareness and action about this difficult topic.
Sold, Pleasance Forth, 3-29 August, 11.10am
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