Mitri is a sweet young terrorist who must lose his virginity tonight. Read more …
But will he even get out of the brothel alive?
There’s only one bordello left in the middle of a brutal warzone. It’s being bulldozed tomorrow morning. Inside, the atmosphere’s like an X-rated mad hatter’s tea party. The Madam refuses to serve Mitri unless he joins in the surreal parlour games the prostitutes are playing. Reckless with lust, he agrees. They immediately lock the doors…
The Last Bordello is an ingeniously fiendish labyrinth that gets more puzzling and suspenseful with every wrong turn - think Margaret Atwood meets David Lynch. An absurd, sensual and provocative parable about trust and truth, domination and devotion, fact and fiction.
Despite teetering on the edge of frustration at times, sticking with the play until its ambiguous denouement is worth the head-scratching.
There is much to enjoy in these multiple stories and puzzles and the profane dialogue, even if the sprawling script, which is dense in references to Genet’s work as well as his activism on behalf of the Palestinians and the Black Panthers, at times disrupts the narrative flow and our capacity to engage.
Leddy’s own production constructs an unhinged Russian doll of a play.
The Last Bordello emerges as a show that takes no prisoners – or if it does, only uses the kind of handcuffs that are made to remind us how power, pleasure, oppression and violence remain linked, in our troubled sexual imaginations.
A singular theatrical experience — but definitely not one for the faint-hearted.
Beautifully orchestrated.
It may sometimes feel too episodic, but it's a bold game with equal parts beauty and brutality.
The production has a great visual ending, but it rather loses its way before that. Plenty of potential for the future, with avenues like Genet's involvement with the Black Panthers to go down.
The Last Bordello, with its cabaret closure of vice and virtue, is hopefully not the taste of things to come.
Unlike the avant-garde work it seeks to replicate, Leddy’s piece has very little going on beneath the slightly risque surface.
Leddy's Bordello Edinburgh bound
The Last Bordello addresses provocative matters
David Leddy--The Last Bordello
Tron Theatre, Glasgow from Friday February 10, 2017, until Friday February 17, 2017. More info: www.tron.co.uk
Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Wednesday February 21, 2018, until Saturday February 24, 2018. More info: www.traverse.co.uk