Puttana ***

Puttana is an uncomfortable theatrical experience. It’s supposed to be.

The audience don headsets and are immersed into the production, with the performer – Beatrice Elena Festi – assuming five different roles. She flits from microphone to microphone with no cohesive storyline, splintered and provocative rather than collaborative.

Puttana is an Italian word for prostitute, but it carries a heavier, more derogatory weight - perhaps

‘whore’ being the closest translation.

TeatroE’s production employs soundscape technology alongside Festi’s deliberately disjointed performance to shine a light on the dark underworld of the sex industry. It explores the commodification of women's bodies and the violence that can accompany it.

The technology is deliberately unsettling: voices and imagined conversations merge, overlay, collapse and distort. It all seems designed to grant access to inner thoughts. Is the voice in our ear shouting, imploring or whispering? The uncertainty is part of the unease.

Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet that the function of art is to hold up a mirror to nature. In theatre, we talk of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ – but in Puttana that’s not what this is. The boundary between performer and audience is stripped away, requiring those present to hold up that mirror. We may not like what we see.

Control is a central theme. Festi portrays both the menace and banality with which control is used and its impact on those subjected to it. The sex worker Laura is at the centre of events, but the client has the power. Not always though: one of the most interesting moments comes when a client realises that his money is no longer welcome.

Festi is a confident and agile performer, who tackles this material unflinchingly. There’s a strong sense of menace at times, but at others heartbreaking vulnerability. Shame and guilt are implicitly connected with the industry; Laura furiously scrubs away at her skin in a shower, but the sense is that she will never be able to purge feelings.

The nature of the production is repetitive, echoing the physical acts at its centre. But this is perhaps where the piece falters, its message waning and failing to fully land.

Unsettling, discombobulating, opaque, intimate, powerful, distinctive - Puttana is more performance art than theatre. This is simultaneously its strength and its weakness.

Summerhall, until 31st August.