Trade – The Pleasance Theatre, London

Writer: Ella Dorman-Gajic

Director: Maddy Corner

It is the aftermath of the Bosnian war. Jana works in her family’s small-town grocery store selling potatoes and cabbages to passing workers. A quirky and bright girl on the verge of adulthood, she spends her leisure time helping mum with the cooking and teaching younger sister Katarina English.

Stefan (Ojan Genc), a seemingly charming young man, frequents the shop. The two strike up a friendship which leads the innocent Jana(Katarina Novkovic) to fall in love. But Stefan is not quite who he seems. His insistence that the couple moves to London to find jobs as cleaners masks more sinister motives. When Jana wakes up bloodied and hungover in a dingy basement in Sarajevo it is the beginning of a nightmare journey. She soon learns that “nothing ever comes for free when it comes to men”.

Writer Ella Dorman-Gajic’s Trade is an unflinching and sometimes harrowing exploration of the dehumanising horrors of sex trafficking. Designer Natasha Gatward sets the action among a dozen or so cardboard packing cases. It is a powerful expression of the idea that for traffickers, women’s bodies are goods, bought and sold in an underground world at whatever price men are willing to pay. But Trade is also a morality play that asks, at what point does the victim become the perpetrator?

Jana is a complex and flawed character whose journey from the counter of her parents’ shop to fronting another, darker, kind of business, is hard to watch. The teenager’s white dress, pristine at the outside of the play, gets bloodied, stained with dirt, and splattered with the filth of a brothel as the play progresses. It is a metaphor for the state of her soul. This a character who demands both sympathy and condemnation.

Novkovic is excellent as the conflicted Jana, whose initial trauma bonding with the gangster who controls her soon evolves from coercion to cooperation. Genc is on top form too as the oleaginous amoral racketeer, as is Eleanor Roberts as Jana’s naïve and other-worldly sister. Maddy Corner’s nimble direction, with the action set against back projections of dingy basements and seedy hotel rooms, adds atmosphere to a thought-provoking narrative that is packed with momentum. Trade is not an easy watch, but it’s one that deserves attention.

Runs until 25 March 2023 then on UK tour until 9 April 2023