Sold

A young man is kicked to death for asking for his passport. A girl is drugged, beaten and forced into prostitution. Confessing complicity in the trafficking of 800 children from a single Romanian village, an imprisoned people-smuggler observes with chilling flippancy that "it must be so quiet there now".

These are not scenes drawn from some distant human rights horror show: this is, we are told, Britain today. In Catherine Alexander's Sold, the victims of human trafficking have their stories told with savage frankness in a brutally harrowing piece of theatre – albeit one that at times undermines its own narrative integrity.

Constructed as a series of beautifully interlaced tableaux, Sold observes the spiralling despair of the victims of trafficking through their own eyes. But in a calculated stylistic move, the exploited are given less personality than their exploiters: they are naïfs, almost childlike in their vulnerability and completely dominated by the callous, manipulative sociopaths who deprive them of their freedom.

The acting is consistently excellent—Paula Videniece is particularly heartbreaking in her fragility as Latvian dancer Aija—while the stark, darkly stylised staging magnifies the emotionally sickening nature of the victims' reality. But, unfortunately, Sold proves reluctant to let its subjects speak entirely for themselves, as the drama is repeatedly put on hold while three activist narrators lament government inaction. These policy lectures have a valid purpose, but Sold's characters are unquestionably strong enough to tell their own stories.

It's deeply distressing to watch, but Sold is not about redemption. Rather, it's about awareness, and in that it succeeds masterfully.