It is very difficult to remain lucid and objective while watching Lucy Kirkwood’s poetically titled play. Partly because the subject, human traffic and sex slavery, is so enraging and so frustratingly ignored and underestimated, and partly because the text does everything in its power to generate raw feelings.

For the past two years, Kirkwood has been writer-in-residence for Clean Break, a women’s theatre company set up by two prisoners in 1979, and still generating not only plays, but also education and training for women in prisons and former offenders. Clean Break’s Head of Artistic Programme Lucy Morrison is the director of this production,  and worked closely with Kirkwood to devise it. The result is a journey through the story of Dijana, a young Eastern European woman who comes to London to follow a boyfriend, and quickly becomes his victim, imprisoned day and night in a dirty, dilapidated bedroom - probably not much different from those whose windows full of red lights and ‘Model’ signs adorn the streets of Soho. In between clients, she only dreams of seeing her daughter, a little girl, her ‘little clown’, who lives in Brighton.

There is so much about Dijana that is simply heartbreaking and at the same time surreally endearing: the tiny pink notebook in which she keeps track of how much she has earned - and her belief that her boyfriend turned pimp, Babac, will really let her go once she reaches £20,000; her continuous, naive references to contemporary models of luxury and debauchery (‘I guess I’m like Billie Piper the most’); the apparent innocence and yet utter implausibility of her simplest dreams. Hara Yannas’s moving performance gives Djiana a soft beauty, and a sweet optimism that refuses to be shattered. She swims and elbows her way in the wasteland of discarded objects that populate Chloe Lamford’s surprising walk-through set: a total of six Alice-in-Wonderland rooms to create which the Arcola has occupied a whole warehouse behind their main building. We proceed with her, through a universe of whitewashed walls, green fake light, paper-thin furniture, shiny bedspreads, tiny swimming suits for tiny little girls, cuddly toys, iPhones,  plastic flowers, washing machines wrapped in transparent film. Lingering on every surface the cloying smell of the synthetic room deodoriser used to erase the trace of the horrors.

Surrounded by tackiness and wasted abundance, Dijana is no different from any of these cheap objects around her: she is rushing, like them, towards obsoleteness, in the fastest lane of disposability, hugged then forgotten, desired only until she becomes repulsive as a reminder of the very desire she fulfilled. She talks to her lost child and to herself and to the voyeuristic audience, who is ever so close to her at all times, in long, energetic leaps of words: she has a happy disposition, she can be funny, she can be smart, she can be ambitious and decisive, but she will be, eventually, completely and irreparably annihilated. And in this tragedy, our physical presence - the sets mainly forcing us to occupy a front row - makes us all too aware of our passive involvement.

We follow Dijana as she climbs walls and crawls inside air conducts and cowers on the floor until she finds little hidden doors through which she follows her personal white rabbit of irrepressible delusions and emerges in her past. At one point, while imprisoned (this being one of the most enraging aspects of the story Kirkwood and Morrison are telling for her), she shares a cell with another woman in a similar position: feisty and loud Gloria, brilliantly played by Madeline Appiah - so brilliantly that I would have loved the opportunity to see her being more than, mainly, a provider of comic relief.  And just as much, I would have appreciated at the very end the chance of a less touching view of Dijana - because when we learn that during her first weeks in London she ‘worked the phones’ for her boyfriend, arranging appointments for other slaves to whom she never thought she would become comparable, it is too late, we love her too much - and perhaps there is a touch of excessive tenderness in the last minutes of Kirkwood’s text, a shadow of manipulation, whereas surely such a story does not need the extra sugar-coating.

Nonetheless, there is no chance of being left indifferent by this production, and there is no chance of not remembering this night and this journey the next time we will pass one of those Soho windows.

Till 31 October 2009