Writer: Stoness Verda
Director: Kerensa Diball
As the show starts, Stoness Verda parades around a stage flooded in red light, wearing a see-through top and vinyl fetish gear and brandishing a whip. It’s a stereotypical portrayal of a dominatrix sex worker, but it doesn’t last for long.
As the first of several audio interviews plays with subtitles projected onto the back of the stage, Verda changes into loose-fitting clothes. They talk about taking the bus back from a job and imagining how many other passengers have a tote bag full of sex toys, and about how they attend eviction resistance events – community-led occasions designed to stop bailiffs and landlords removing tenants in order to gain time or prevent homelessness.
Community is a watchword for Verda, who has a warm, welcoming demeanour as she passes a snack box of apricots around the audience. So too is care – specifically, the notion that sex work could be considered a form of care work.
Verda cites the theory (first posited by psychotherapist Virginia Satir) that we need twelve hugs a day for growth. While they baulk at that number, it does tie in to an overall thesis that sex work can have beneficial, therapeutic properties, whether for client or practitioner.
Verda also considers this may not be a popular opinion, as evidenced by another played-in conversation, this time from a professional massage therapist who also happens to be Verda’s mother. Her opinion on masseuses who offer other, more sexual practices is punctuated by embarrassed laughter, affording the whole interaction a sweetness and levity that fits with Verda’s personality.
Elsewhere, though, there is a bittiness to the whole piece, as Verda moves between strip club stories and re-enactments of attempting to clean up her online profile so that it is “safe for work”, as a ramification of the UK’s Digital Safety Act.
Each segment of Verda’s piece feels like it has something to say, but as a whole, the piece is a little too fragmentary to be as effective as it wants to be. Other performances in Camden People’s Theatre’s SPRINT Festival are explicitly tagged as work-in-progress pieces: that’s the feeling here, that we are witnessing an unfinished piece that knows what it wants to say but has not yet clarified how it should say it.
What That Song From Rocky Horror (Toucha, Toucha, Touch Me) does achieve, though, is to emphasise Stoness Verda’s ability to engross an audience. There are moments when their work truly shows its potential, and it feels like a future iteration of the piece could really fly.
Reviewed on 20 March 2026
