The New Play That Explores Violence Against Sex Workers

17 July 2014 | 1:48 pm | Dave Drayton

Why Peta Brady wrote Ugly Mugs.

In a piece on overcoming that difficult second novel, Annabel Smith, author of
Whisky Charlie Foxtrot
, spoke of the importance of a real job in order to remain in touch with a reality otherwise avoided while cooped up at the writer’s desk.

That’s certainly true for Peta Brady, who, since 2000, has maintained dual careers in theatre and as a community outreach worker in St Kilda, where she’s worked with needle-exchange programs and more recently with sex workers. The two pursuits first collided on stage in 2005 when Brady played a heroin-addict-turned-sex-worker in Patricia Cornelius’ Love.

“People in the arts often do need a second job now, but if you’re lucky enough you can get one that supports the work also, and mine does, so I’m very enriched by the work that I do. A playwright doesn’t have to work in the area they’re writing about, research can do that too, but for me one definitely feeds the other.”

Since then the lines have blurred further as Brady set to work writing Ugly Mugs, a play that takes its name from a grassroots pamphlet developed by the Prostitute Collective of Victoria (now RHED) in the mid-1980s, exploring street violence against sex workers.

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‘Mug’ is sex worker slang for an aggressive client, and in Victoria, where working the street is yet to be decriminalised, loopholes result in a crucial lack of support and protection sex workers receive from police and legal institutions.

“That was why the Ugly Mugs program was established. Because of this lack of support, it was a way of getting these things reported so people knew who was out there.”

As a firsthand witness to such injustices in one job, Brady used her other as a platform to shed light on these stories. A girl is attacked at a football field; elsewhere, a woman relives a recent terror in the presence of a doctor. In one night two stories brush against one another. “I was looking at who are the women on the streets dealing with this violence, and what are their rights – which are none. But the sex workers know who’s out there, but others don’t, so the second story thread gives a younger voice dealing with the same streets.”

Ugly Mugs premiered in May at Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre under the direction of its Artistic Director Marion Potts, and the production arrives at Griffin’s SBW Stables this month. During the play’s Melbourne run, some of the members of the prostitute collective that started the program came to see it and introduce themselves. “It was so nice to have a really open discussion, and they were so happy I’d taken on that story; they started it in 1986 and now it’s going worldwide. It’s a very successful program, but the people that started it in the ‘80s, they don’t get any credit, so it was really nice to have that community contact.”