Stripped bare

Penelope Skinner is a curious person to be around. Like a glowering, sulky child, she responds to initial questions with suspicion. And her ability to underplay her own ability is remarkable. "It's another shit title," she says, when asked about her current work in progress. "Everyone's gonna slag off that one as well – but apparently I'm not very good with titles." And what's the new work about? After telling me it focuses on characters' interactions with each other, she immediately balks at her words: "Ugh. That sounds shit. Don't write that."

Fucked—Skinner's powerful monologue portraying a young woman's physical and mental decline—has made a huge impact on this year's Fringe. Yet many have been put off the play by the obscenity of its title, perceiving a cheap grab for shock value. "I think that's a good lesson: to set a really low expectation," says Skinner. Everyone in the room laughs. "So then people are surprised," she murmurs, with a faint smile.

In a stilted, self-conscious tone of voice, almost as if reciting the answer to an exam question, she tells me she was first inspired to write her one-woman debut following the viewing of the play When You Cure Me. "I had a sort of life-affirming experience and understood that theatre had the potential to validate people's experiences; and I thought I would write a play about..." Here she looks down uncertainly before continuing: "...my own experiences...with the idea to, I don't know, put it out there. That was all." The last sentence is throwaway: a sell-out run in London, five-star revirgviews in Edinburgh; a play that is at once honest, touching, very funny and unashamedly frank...Skinner shrugs, uncomfortable with praise. She wrote a play, is all. 

Becci Gemmell—the actress who plays 'F'—could not seem more different to the playwright. Yet curiously, the two women appear incredibly close. Their thoughts on the play, on the issues it raises and their responses to criticism appear to run parallel to each other. Throughout the interview (for they ask to be interviewed together), one will finish the other's sentence or the pair will blurt out the same response. The duo, along with director David Goldman and producer Hannah Spens-Black, complement each other perfectly as a team, which only serves to enhance the production even further. Reviews of Fucked during its London run praised the performance of Gemmell but one reviewer criticised her as too "mumsy". I begin to ask if she thinks this reflects the view that a woman cast in a role like this should be a kittenish sexpot – but before I finish the question she jumps in, crying "Abso-fricking-lutely!"

"The reviewer didn't like that this girl who'd got two As and a B [for her A Levels] could suddenly be on - what did she say Penny?" 

"A 'hiding to whoredom'!" they shout in unison. "And that it essentially wouldn't happen."

"Yeah, that's what she said." says Gemmell angrily. "Wouldn't happen, didn't believe it: the story was 'made up'. She thought that this girl was too intelligent—too intelligent?!—to end up in a strip club." Both shake their heads in disbelief.

A notable line in the play occurs in a scene with the 17 year old—and still virginal—F telling the audience her mate is a "slag", before correcting herself and assuring everyone that women are free to do as they please in their sex lives. Gemmell's delivery is comical in its manner – recalling, it would seem, the naive assumption that with casual sex comes emancipation. I wonder if this confusion and internal struggle is the legacy of 90s feminism: an era which celebrated a new form of overt, aggressively sexual behaviour in women as something to be embraced.

Recounting an incident from when she was younger, Gemmell says: "I remember saying to a friend, 'If, at 18, I wanna sleep with loads of people, then that's fine, then I'm allowed to do that.' And [yet] I was simultaneously having the thought that I don't actually want to be doing that.'"

"The play is supposed to be about how confusing [female sexuality] is," adds Skinner, "the whole thing – like what am I supposed to be; what am I supposed to believe; how am I meant to behave, and what does it mean about me? Basically it's confusing from the beginning and continues to be confusing"—she falters slightly—"until the end".

Since the show came to Edinburgh, the script has acquired new details, including a line detailing what strippers do during their period. Gemmell loves this: "It's fucking important that people know, when you're stripping, what happens every month: you need to cut the string off a tampon and shove it up; people don't want to think about that for a second so they go 'ohh...'"

Gemmell's statement is a small part of a wider truth: despite the hundreds of lapdancing bars that have mushroomed across Britain in the last 15 years, the representation of lapdancers in both the press and the creative industries is often inaccurate and always polarised. Even those who claim a wish to expose the realities of an industry shrouded in mystery often obscure the facts further, invariably playing either on some illusory idea of female sexuality's 'dark side' or opting for the downtrodden, working-class character who is on the first step of the ladder to prostitution.

The beauty of Fucked is that it does neither of these things. It dispenses with finger-wagging disapproval and casually demolishes any idea of 'feminine mystique' as soon as F has the stray toilet-paper stuck to her genitals pointed out to her during a lapdance. Tragedy lies in the accumulation of little things: the poor wages, the same mindless conversations night after night and the 'very serious' business of Being Sexy.

"I know definitely, at the time [of writing the play] there were loads of myths that I wanted to, sort of, expose", nods Skinner.

Despite being part of a production with such a boldly confrontational title ("We have to be really careful who we flyer to"), both Gemmell and Skinner confess to initial fears of male judgment on the play. Skinner worried that male reviewers would respond negatively, but has been pleasantly surprised by the positive responses.

Gemmell tells of a more recent incident in Edinburgh: "On the first night there was a guy—an old guy—sat in the front row and I'm thinking 'You're hating this: you're hating the content, you hate everything about it- I'm embarrassed and you're making me nervous.' Then I thought, 'Oh, more fool you – you came to see a play called Fucked and that's your problem."

And with that, the two women head off, half-joking with the director about making the play an off-Broadway hit. "I think the Americans will like it," muses Skinner, hesitant as ever. "I'm sure they will."