The Girlfriend Experience (NHB Modern Plays)

By Alecky Blythe

A true-life play about friendship, heartbreak and business enterprise... in a seaside brothel.

Tessa has set up a business: a brothel where mature women specialise in offering the 'Girlfriend Experience', a surprisingly caring and sympathetic service.

As the women stoically strive to make a living in a competitive market, their personal lives start to crumble. Will they ever have loving relationships outside work and enjoy being girlfriends themselves?

The Girlfriend Experience continues the verbatim-theatre technique Alecky Blythe developed in Come Out Eli and Cruising. The play is created entirely from conversations recorded inside an actual brothel, edited and replicated on stage in all their uncanny verisimilitude.

'funny, touching and absolutely filthy... a hugely entertaining eye-opener of a show' - Telegraph

'poignant, sometimes disturbing, often riotously funny' - The Times

'These women aren't patronised or made into gargoyles: their sentences are gorgeous. They simply reveal their lives. What more could you want from the theatre?' - Observer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Release date: Oct 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780013282

Alecky Blythe

Alecky Blythe founded verbatim-theatre company Recorded Delivery in 2003. The company's first production, Come Out Eli, premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, and later transferred to the BAC (winner of the Time Out Award for Best Performance on the Fringe). Other work includes: All the Right People Come Here (New Wimbledon Theatre); Strawberry Fields (The Courtyard, Hereford); Cruising (Bush Theatre, London, 2006); The Girlfriend Experience (Royal Court Theatre, London, 2008; Young Vic, London, 2009); I Only Came Here for Six Months (KVS and Les Halles, Brussels); Do We Look Like Refugees?! (National Theatre Studio / Rustaveli Theatre, Georgia, at Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2010; winner of Fringe First Award); London Road, with music composed by Adam Cork (National Theatre, London, 2011 and 2012; winner of Best Musical, Critics' Circle Awards); Little Revolution (Almeida Theatre, London, 2014) and Our Generation (National Theatre / Chichester Festival Theatre, 2022). For television she has written A Man in a Box (IWC and Channel 4); The Riots: In Their Own Words (BBC2). For film she has adapted London Road into a feature (BBC Film, BFI, National Theatre).