Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Managed Approach
Open Aire Theatre
Genre: Drama, Theatre, Verbatim Theatre
Venue: Gilded Balloon
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
An ambitious drama that blends a wide-angle look at the decriminalisation of sex work in a Leeds district with its impact on two women who live there, Managed Approach takes on a lot of issues and avoids easy answers.
Review
Managed Approach, written by Jules Coyle and directed by Lily Ellis, examines the six-year period during which sex work was decriminalised in the Holbeck area of Leeds. The show blends a fictional story of the relationship between a mother and daughter who live in Holbeck with verbatim accounts taken from interviews with some of the workers.
The production is unflinching in taking on complex and controversial subjects, and laudable for avoiding easy answers as well as the melodrama it occasionally hints at, but then swerves away from. The four actors perform on a tiny stage, but the set – a messy single bed – succeeds in conveying both the stereotype of the topic and the chaos just below its surface. Audio is used effectively to suggest other locales.
Two actors play multiple roles as sex workers, interacting with recordings of interviewers. Because of the use of actual interview transcripts not made distinct by fictitious flourishes, the verbatim content has a similar “voice” that can be difficult to assign to the correct person, and this works against the production’s message about the individuality of these women. More might perhaps be done with the use of costuming to distinguish them.
The blurring of these characters underlines another issue, however, which is that it is unclear whether the story is meant to focus more on the mother/daughter dyad or the workers. The intercutting of what are often very brief interviews with the fictional story doesn’t serve well to advance either one: though each sex worker is identified by name in the interviews, they receive too limited a depiction to be more than sketches; and the frequent interruptions of the fictional story – especially in conjunction with plot points that are slow to develop – interfere with the momentum of that dynamic as well.
The story spends more time setting up its conflicts than resolving them, which is unfortunate, because the collision course of the mother and daughter is appealingly dramatic, and the story’s denouement feels rushed. Some of the most interesting questions – why Holbeck for this social experiment, rather than central London – are only raised at the end, without time to explore them.
There is some nice intergenerational context given to round out the family dynamic, but this also adds yet another layer to a show that is perhaps already taking on too much within its running time. The ambition of Managed Approach is admirable, as is its recognition of the number of variables involved in municipal policies on sex work, but the show might accomplish more by trying to do less.
