Review: THE LIFE, Southwark Playouse

The Life of the title is that of New York's Times Square in the mid 70s, the life of Midnight Cowboy, of seedy bars and strip joints, of the Big Apple at its most rancid.

Much has changed since then: AIDS (of which there is a hint or two in the show); successive "clean-up" operations by mayors and the invisible hand of gentrification and, like so much else, a privatisation of the consumption of sex workers' services, first on videotape and now online. But, as the song "The Oldest Profession" points out, as long as there are men, there will be johns, and as long as there are johns, there will be hookers, and as long as there are hookers, there will be pimps. Out of sight may be out of mind - but not out of existence.

Cy Coleman and Ira Gasman's Broadway musical, now 20 years old but barely showing its age, tracks the interwoven stories of Queen, a hooker desperate to get out of the life, and Mary, keen to get on in pornography, a character based to some extent on Linda Lovelace. They cross paths via Jojo, a fixer/procurer of working girls for pimps, of whom Memphis is the baddest on the block. Their insular world also finds places for a variety of sex workers, barmen and hired muscle, but it's a world in which (as a lyric informs us) nobody is "nice".

Rocking some very evocative costumes (I'm sure I saw Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch at one point), the ensemble cast is universally strong, delivering humour and pathos, but never straying into a misplaced sentimentality. T'shan Williams and Joanna Woodward play the contrasting women, Queen and Mary, with conviction and sing superbly, while Cornell S. John is menacing as Memphis and John Addison all oily charm as Jojo.

The chorus work is good and the solos impressive, ranging from power ballads to lamenting love songs through to assertions of power, sexual, financial and physical, but I'm afraid that we're always just waiting for Sharon D. Clarke to sing again. Her ageing tart-with-a-heart (and an unnamed, unknown virus), Sonja, provides the moral centre of this amoral milieu, but when she sings... Well, nobody in the audience is more than 30 feet away and Clarke's voice packs a visceral punch while retaining a deep rolling sadness - what a thrill to hear it at such close quarters!

Even allowing for press night overruns, the show is too long and the exposition a little overdone for characters who are pretty much stock when it comes to the many musicals and operas set amongst prostitutes and pimps. Nearly three hours and 22 songs (even songs as brilliantly written and performed as the sex workers' demand to make their own choices, "My Body", and the uproarious, celebratory "The Hookers' Ball") is simply too much - less would certainly be more here.

With reactionary authoritarianism on the march around the world and the control of women's bodies back as a political issue on which old white men can parade their hypocritical "morality", Michael Blakemore's revival (and the show's London premiere) is timely. They live hard lives full of cruelty, these hookers, but they are real people with real dreams. And real fears too. They deserve not our sympathy, but our respect, and the right to working conditions as healthy and supportive as possible. The Life they lead is not going to be wished away by anyone.

The Life continues at Southwark Playhouse until 29 April

Read our interview with Michael Blakemore

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