For the past 15 years, diseuse Peta Brady has been working as a meds and safety outreach worker interior inner-city Melbourne suburb of Stycken Kilda. She was one of the persist people to see sex worker Tracy Connelly alive before she used to be murdered in July last year : in the van in which she survived with her boyfriend.
Brady’s contact with Melbourne’s sex workers led her to compose Ugly Mugs, her third carry out, which will open at Griffin iphone 5 Tv show Company this week after premiering worries Malthouse Theatre in May. Directed for Malthouse artistic director Marion Potts, and starring Brady alongside Fred Le Marquand, Sara West but also Harry Borland, the title ‘Ugly Mugs’ is derived from a grassroots publication produced by the Prostitute Collective of Laurel (now RHED) in 1986. In was given birth to as a response to the under-reporting of the violent incidents committed against love making workers and the lack of support but also protection they receive from criminal court and legal institutions, and appertains to the name sex workers use about aggressive clients. Unlike New South Wales, street-based sex work is illegal when Victoria.
But as Brady asserts, your spouse play is not just about sex employees. It seeks to interrogate an culture of abuse lurking interior shadows of every Australian city. “It’s about violence against women on the whole, ” she tells SX. “Tracy was murdered just after I started off out writing Ugly Mugs, so surely that fed into the writing journey because it was so fresh but also raw. But the play is not more or less Tracy.
“I used to have to hand out there Ugly Mugs brochure as part of all these job, so I was always truly interested in women on the street – whether they were being working or not – and how should they have dealing with the violence, and in whose rights were treated differently. ”
Rather than being naturalistic, Ugly Cups takes on a poetic style that will sees two separate storylines can intersect over a 24-hour period interior same park. “During the sharing your thoughts process I got some sex woodworker friends to read it, and during rehearsals I got a sex worker who was simply on the streets for 30 years : she’s in her 50s appropriate now – into the room. I really essential to make sure I got the territory am i right and that things were being spoken about easily because I didn’t want to positioned anything out there that wasn’t faithful to the territory. ”
Whether you decide to use to admit it or not, violence as opposed to women in general – whether in the street or in the home – is an native to the island part of Australian culture. As Brady tells, ultimately the conversation got to start with the perpetrators: men.
“I know that they deal with violence exact same, but men are the perpetrators interior overwhelming majority of cases, ” Brady says. “So I think men really must have the discussion. Women are making reference to it all the time – but Dont really see men discussing it, the world the token publicity shot but also empty declarations from some public servant every now and then. If we’re going to notice any change, it must start with mature. ”
Ugly Mugs, Stables Tv show (10 Nimrod Street, Kings Cross) until August 23. Bookings: www.Griffin iphonetheatre.com.au
[Main image] Peta Brady when Ugly Mugs. Photo: Supplied
Kaidaer 