A true-life play about friendship, heartbreak and business enterprise… in a seaside brothel.
Tessa has set up a business: a brothel where mature women specialise in offering the ‘Girlfriend Experience’, a surprisingly caring and sympathetic service.
As the women stoically strive to make a living in a competitive market, their personal lives start to crumble. Will they ever have loving relationships outside work and enjoy being girlfriends themselves?
The Girlfriend Experience continues the verbatim-theatre technique Alecky Blythe developed in Come Out Eli and Cruising. The play is created entirely from conversations recorded inside an actual brothel, edited and replicated on stage in all their uncanny verisimilitude.
Alecky Blythe’s play was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in September 2008. The production transferred to the Young Vic, London, in July 2009.
‘Funny, touching and absolutely filthy… a hugely entertaining eye-opener of a show’
— Telegraph
‘Poignant, sometimes disturbing, often riotously funny’
— The Times
‘These women aren’t patronised or made into gargoyles: their sentences are gorgeous. They simply reveal their lives. What more could you want from the theatre?’
— Observer
