Experience review, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs

On the way to Hampstead Theatre my Uber driver cut up an SUV and was stopped by the police. The ensuing exchange went on so long I legged it up the road and hailed a black cab, arriving with seconds to spare. Halfway through the Experience of Experience I imagined my evening if I'd been left stranded. Walking back home in the freezing wet would surely have been less painful than Dave Florenz's 75 minute exploration of sexual therapy as a form of prisoner rehabilitation?

Experience is a drama that leaves you conflicted. It shows too much and says too little. It's the story of Dan, who threw acid in a girl's face when he was 16, and a sexual surrogate, Amy. Amy has been sent to the mental institution where Dan's spent the subsequent 16 years, to  humanise, sensitise, and rehabilitate him in readiness for release. It's an intense, intimate, and difficult process and there is an ambiguity in the writing that makes it difficult to analyse the ethical implications raised.

Ultimately Experience is about people in pain. Amy is being pushed to get quick results and save her bosses from losing their service contract. The therapists, like many who build careers as healers, are themselves managing emotional anxieties and personal pain.  Dan, we discover, is driven by terrible demons that predate his unforgivable crime. Daily Mail-type questions are raised. How can we justify state-funded paid sex for prisoners?  I would guess the answer is easily because these decisions are not made lightly, but to be quite frank, I'd rather have read the polemic than watched it.

In conclusion: Tom Attenborough's production is very physical and tense in the tiny space at Hampstead Downstairs. Christian Cooke is deeply moving as Dan, and Charlotte Lucas is an interesting mix of open and closed as Amy, discreetly pulling off an act of intimacy that had many of us squirming. It's not one for the faint-hearted.



Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, London NW3 3EU.  Run ends 18 Feb