Review: Mod Girl, theSpace @ Surgeons Hall

ANY play that begins with a street corner transaction with a prostitute was always going to finish this way, naked and dark. ***

Yet what makes Mod Girl, a new play from Bath University Student Theatre, more compelling than the average undergraduate effort, is that, for much of the hour, it makes redemption possible.

Elle Porrill and Jack Collard play the prostitute and her widower customer. Instead of sex, the polite and measured Collard pays for them to go on a date. They bond over life stories, chips, and ruminations on the Virgin Mary. It threatens to get all Pretty Woman, as, like that film, Mod Girl has a varnished view of the sex trade. But writer/director Ian Lerch and his cast are on surer ground with pacing the darkening of the mood. A racist joke here, an icy silence there. Certain lines pepper the script like grit in ice-cream, unsignposted prophecies that linger long after the end.

“It’s always the quiet ones,” someone says. Mod Girl holds open the escape hatch, then cruelly shuts it, leaving nothing behind but gloom.

Edd McCracken

Until 11 August. Today 8:50pm.