Daughters of Whores opens with a young woman cheerfully telling us about her mother. She was, you see, a sex worker.

The daughter chooses to call her a whore, though. She uses it in the way some do; it puckers her face and pricks at her tone with an acidity that twists the meaning into something bitter and harsh. There is no love, or pride, or even acceptance in it and this sets the tenor for the rest of our time. There is a deep vein of disgust and discomfort with sex work that pulses throughout.

The small cast work somewhat clumsily through a narrative in which we follow this woman’s fractured relationship with her mother. She is laden with issues around sex and men; hungry and addicted, she also reviles them and rages at her boyfriend. She is bitter towards her mother, who is presented as a vain, mild mannered but altogether abstract being of whom we only know two things: she was a whore, and she is this woman’s mother.

As a person who is a sex-worker ally, and is pro sex-work, I found this play difficult to watch without walking out. It was, to be quite blunt, whorephobic from start to finish. I got the impression that it was trying to hold some of these views to the light for us to critique, but those attempts were so confusing, vague and impossible to decipher from actual whorephobia that I ended up feeling frustrated and alienated by the piece.

Almost every poor stereotype about sex work and sex workers was present here. We are told “there are no fat whores” (far from the truth). We are told sex workers are obsessed with their looks. We are told that their clients are grubby sad men. But the key implication is that sex workers damage their children by their choice of work. The protagonist’s deeply flawed psyche and clearly fractured relationship with herself, her body, sex, her partner and her parent speak to confirm what we’re all supposed to believe: sex work makes you a bad mother, and will produce bad children.

We hear from the sex worker who is the supposed root of all this evil about halfway into the play. I anticipated some humanity, some revelation and contrast that would help us intellectually rebuff the narrative that was being constructed by the daughter’s tortured persona. Instead, she told us that she was abused by church clergy as a little girl. I almost groaned aloud – of course, all sex workers are damaged and desperate souls, right? The stereotype of the sex-worker-as abuse-victim was being reiterated for all to see, with no deconstruction of the fallibility of that alleged causal link.

The one bright light amongst all the negativity was the sweet, young and self confident sex worker that we first meet giving the mother-whore botox at a beauty clinic. She gets into the industry so she can save for a trip to Europe, and we see her during her first booking – with the daughter-of-whore’s boyfriend. She is nervous, shaky, and a bit dorky. As she gives him a blowjob, he begins to denigrate her verbally, asking “you enjoy sucking cock don’t you, you dirty little whore?” She responds with a chipper “yep!” to each of his epithets, unfazed.

She evolves into a confident, self possessed woman who navigates the pitfalls of the sex industry. She happens to meet the daughter-of-whore by chance at the end of the play, in a park. In a final act of viciousness, the daughter has baked her mother’s ashes into a loaf of bread and is feeding her to ducks. But, that’s okay, because “she was a whore, you know”.

The young sex worker is stunned by both her actions and her words. “It’s just a job,” she tells the daughter-of-whore, and eventually she walks away, but not before offering genuine condolences about the mother’s death in a traffic accident.

This scene is then followed by a closing dialogue between the daughter-of-whore and her boyfriend as they talk about their pending progeny: she is up the duff. They discuss the child’s future (“you don’t want her to be a slut, do you?”) and the young sex worker passes them. They both recognise her for different reasons, and then fall into a loving embrace as she fades from view, neither of them acknowledging her.

And so order is restored, with the hetero-normative ideal at centre, the whore sublimated and fringe-dwelling once again. All’s well that maintains the status quo, I guess.

Overall, Daughters of Whores presents a fairly unsophisticated, oft-seen view of sex workers that left me feeling less entertained than disappointed. I think the same play, with some reworking, could present a much more delicate handling of what it is to be the child of a sex worker; but unfortunately this was not what we received. Profundity gave way to cliche, despite the best of efforts.

« »