A success at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, Jules Coyle‘s play about the Holbeck industrial district in Leeds, Managed Approach, comes into London for a run at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. It’s produced by Open Aire Theatre.
The title refers to an initiative that ran from 2014 to 2020 in the area, where policing focused on crime rather than arresting sex workers in the assigned zone.
Coyle herself plays Abbie, a teenager just turned 18 – nervous, reckless, argumentative, but beginning to understand the world.. It’s 2014. Sex work in Holbeck is effectively legal under police supervision. Holbeck is an area of the city with a difficult history.
The Yorkshire Ripper was more active in this area than any other, and his shadow still looms over issues around men’s entitlement and women’s safety. It’s still in living memory for women who remember school closing early and being told to avoid men they didn’t trust.
As Abbie’s mother, Kate, Eanna Ferguson captures the changes in one person as they grow from 70s activism to 90s pragmatism (and prejudice). Alongside this aspect of the play, Managed Approach also contains verbatim testimony from Leeds sex workers who could speak on the positive and negative issues around the project set to increase their safety.
Áine McNamara and H Sneyd play the sex workers who represent these women: Sara and Tara, Dani and Ellen. You find out their back stories and how it feels to work on the streets solo and as part of a community. What you don’t get is a sense of how they view the residents of Holbeck, where they make their money.
Director Lily Ellis stages Managed Approach with a bed, screen, and chair. The screen tells us how the Holbeck project worked, as well as offering a bit of background. Themes throughout the play offer thoughtful contrasts: the door-to-door enquiries that made every man in the area a potential suspect during the Ripper murders; the rallies in support of women’s safety set against social media vigilantism.
We follow Abbie on a couple of nights out in the less salubrious parts of the city. Mam remembers The Viaduct, but other places have a bad rep. There’s an excruciating scene where the teenager shows how naive she is when full of drinks and bravado, she finds herself out of town with a group of strange men. When she needs help, it comes from an unlikely source.
Managed Approach seeks to humanise sex workers as women, rather than undesirables who deserve to be harmed and shunned. In the juxtaposition of Kate and Abbie – plus young Kate with her mother – with the quartet of young sex workers, we see into the benefits and complications of the scheme. No men are included: no clients, neighbours, or even a brother or dad for Abbie.
Managed Approach is a contemplative and assured play. Knowing the area in Leeds well from a stint living there, and remembering the tail end of the Ripper’s activities, I was invested in the drama. Some loose ends remain untied, leaving us wondering, just like life.
Four stars.
Managed Approach continues at Riverside Studios until 25 Apr. Details here.
Photo credit: Katie Burge
This review is dedicated to Wilma McCann, Emily Jackson, Irene Richardson, Patricia Atkinson, Jayne MacDonald, Jean Jordan, Yvonne Pearson, Vera Millward, Helen Rytka, Josephine Whitaker, Barbara Leach, Marguerite Walls and Jacqueline Hill.