Jules Coyle’s poignant play historicises a critical moment for British sex workers
In 2014, the UK’s first legalised red light district was trialled in Leeds, a scheme which was referred to as the “managed approach”. This sterile term is where Jules Coyle’s show takes its name from, exploring the scheme through a mixture of verbatim accounts of women who worked under it and a storyline following a mother and daughter dealing with living in Holbeck, where the scheme was trialled. The show puts forward poignant and complex arguments for and against the managed approach, but its main offering is the empathy it handles all of its characters with.
The mother Kate (Eanna Ferguson) and daughter Abbie (played by Jules Coyle also) are played with great complexity. Coyle’s writing displays an excellent skill in storytelling, something each actor really brings to life, whether it’s Kate describing the fear growing up at the time of the Yorkshire ripper attacks, or it’s Abbie describing a particularly messy eighteenth birthday that saw her escorted home to safety by one of the sex workers in the area. This first story does some necessary and unexpected work reminding us of how ubiquitous and normalised male violence is, and how it is that violence that sits behind every concern and fear driving the conflict between the various women living under the managed approach. It critically centred the experiences of northern women. It made me think of my mother, who grew up in the North at that same time, and has expressed the exact same feeling Kate was recounting on stage. Abbie’s story is particularly compelling, written in a way that also plays on this normalisation of male violence, through the audience’s expectations. It’s a harrowing moment, not in anything that actually happens, but in the imagined scenario it instantly invoked. Managed Approach is worth watching for these moments alone. It is at once an intriguing and revealing piece of work.
The verbatim segments of accounts from sex workers were performed brilliantly by Áine McNamara and H Sneyd. These moments were done with great observation and respect for those interviewed, really humanising the stories told on stage. The inclusion of these moments really strengthened the overall narrative and ethos of the play. It would be great to see these bleed into the main narrative between Kate and Abbie some more, intertwining the two to remind us of the messy nature of community. It would overall be great to see the sex workers get more focus directly, being at the helm of their own story a little more.
In any later iterations, which I hope there will be many more of, the show would benefit from a slightly stronger aesthetic vision. A little more thought behind the design of the show would give the actors a stronger sense of space to work with on stage. But these are minor notes, and Coyle’s play is nothing short of critical for the public’s consciousness. It’s work like this we need exactly more of in the theatrical landscape, work that examines and builds community, critiques policy, and solidifies our own history. Both arguemnts—that the managed approach was only trialled in Holbeck because it was a poorer area in the North, and that the approach helped give the workers the protection they needed for the work they had to do regardless—are compelling and thorny for audiences. The answer? We can’t know for sure, but probably a nationwide ‘Managed Approach’, and crucially, better protections for sex workers. This issue can be dissected all sorts of ways. Coyle has certainly given us great grounds to work on.