Managed Approach is a new, semi-verbatim play about the UK’s first legalised red-light district. The play received 5-star reviews at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, acquired Keep It Fringe funding, and was shortlisted for Pleasance's Charlie Hartill Award. Open Aire Theatre bring this play to Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios in April 2026.
Managed Approach takes its name from a local government initiative that allowed sex workers to operate between 2014-2020 in Holbeck, Leeds. Explored primarily through a fraught mother and daughter relationship, the play analyses Holbeck’s divided response to this controversial scheme. Verbatim monologues of impacted sex workers intersperse this drama, contextualising the storyline with their testimonies. Though a heavy premise, Managed Approach has been lauded for its comedic, sentimental, and joyful strengths.
We sat down with Jules Coyle (writer, co-lead) and Eanna Ferguson (co-lead) to learn more about the play.
What can you tell me about Managed Approach and your roles in the play?
JULES: Managed Approach is a semi-verbatim play about the UK’s first legalised red-light district. The play combines verbatim interviews taken from impacted sex workers with a mother/daughter relationship. I am the writer of Managed Approach and play Abbie, the daughter.
EANNA: And I play Kate, the mother. We have two other actors who double within their verbatim roles.
Jules, you conducted the formative interviews yourself. When you sat down to write, how did you balance the 'duty of care' to the real-world testimonies with the creative freedom needed to build the fictional mother-daughter relationship?
JULES: The two elements of the play complement each other, rather than driving one another. The ‘duty of care’ was a central concern I held when pairing the verbatim testimonies with the fictional drama. By including the sex workers’ unedited speech, I really wanted to amplify their voices and perspectives. My creative freedom came in when choosing how to pair certain monologues with the fictional drama, ensuring they contextualised the story whilst contributing to the wider themes and emotions.
When you’re on stage, does the 'Writer' part of your brain ever try to give notes to the 'Actor' part of your brain? How do you separate the person who lived with these interviews from the person who has to live the character's life tonight?
JULES: This division actually starts all the way in rehearsals. Since beginning this project, I knew I wanted to be directed within my role. Abbie, as a teenage girl living in Leeds, is a character I can really relate to because I lived that experience only a few years ago. Our amazing team of directors, led by Lily Ellis, have injected their own experiences to deepen the nuance of Abbie, so I naturally feel a greater separation from the character and my own life.
You’ve described this as a 'love letter' to Northern women. In a story about a controversial legal scheme and sex work, how did you ensure the joy and sentimentality of these women didn't get buried under the 'grim North' tropes we often see in media?
JULES: In all of my writing, I really believe that you can’t cry with characters unless you’ve laughed with them– so Abbie and Kate have a real range of scenes to build their relationship beyond their central conflict. Furthermore, with the verbatim material, it was really important for me to include these women’s jokes and anecdotes to show their entire personhood. They are sex workers, but they are also daughters, friends, students and so on.
The ‘grim North’ trope was really just evaded by humanising every character and allowing audiences to see them beyond one pessimistic vision.
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| Jules Coyle. Photo by Yellow Belly Photography |
Since the real-world Managed Approach scheme ended in 2020, how has the play’s message shifted for you now that you’re bringing it to London in 2026? Does it feel like a time capsule or a warning?
JULES: The play was written in 2024, so it was always a reflection on the Approach. Within the play, I wanted to represent the spectrum of perspectives on the central issue, both for and against, and the murky in between. It’s this quality that allows audiences to leave with their own opinions, making it more of a time capsule than a warning.
EANNA: And in bringing it to London now, the primary shift we’ve noticed is more so in the creative process. Having played twice before, this run has allowed us to explore our modes of storytelling and become more ‘bodily’ in our performances. Seeing the piece evolve over time has been one of my favourite parts of this project.
The play intersperses heavy verbatim monologues with a comedic, fraught family drama. As actors, how do you manage to balance these backstage?
EANNA: I think the balance comes in understanding that these characters, particularly the verbatim roles, are whole humans. They are not just mouthpieces to provide commentary, but rather complete characters. It’s in this conceptualisation that their range makes sense, so there is less need to ‘balance’ their moments of tension and comedy as we’ve already understood them to contain both – in life as in a script comedy and severity often coexist, and to take this as it comes and portray it with a sense of humanity, even if that seems to contain awkwardness, is really what we are focused on while we are performing. Plus, we’re all mates, which I think helps when dealing with intense material. So we help each other stay paced and feeling alright backstage too.
Eanna and Jules, you play co-leads in a relationship described as 'fraught.' How did you build that specific mother-daughter shorthand? Was there a specific moment in rehearsals where the comedy of their bickering finally clicked?
EANNA: Good question – honestly? I think the mother-daughter shorthand was one of the easiest bits to get right early doors – it’s pretty close to how we are in real life! As friends we’re so close (too close some would say – double trouble) and share a sense of humour in a way that I think is very rare and very good– when you click with someone like that it’s a boon to the comedy, every outing and every dirty martini we share is just non-stop riffing.
But in terms of being a motherly figure, Jules is always telling me about newfangled things, particularly online, that I’m oblivious to, and the way I catch myself responding I remind myself of my own mum (!). And I care so much for Jules, just as my character Kate says of Abbie in the show– I remember we were all out for a few one night at fringe and planning a big night out after the show and Jules had forgotten her keys and left her door open, and I turn to her without missing a beat and go ‘Well I’m very disappointed Jules’. Totally unintentional but that shows you our dynamic– it’s a bit chicken-and-egg with me and feeling so comfortable in a role as ‘mother’…
JULES: It was fairly easy to create a familial shorthand between Eanna and me, because we naturally feel like two sides of the same coin. Having both grown up in the North, we share so many similar references and have a very similar sense of humour - so we already had a familiar rapport. To root this rapport specifically in a mother and daughter relationship involved some close textual work in rehearsals, alongside drawing on personal experiences within the mother-daughter dynamic.
The show also explores how womanhood often repeats itself - while these characters are mother and daughter, they both share the experience of being, or having been, young women, and we wanted to make these parallels clear. Though Eanna is playing a mum and I am a daughter, there are moments in the play where Eanna’s character takes on the role of a daughter herself. It’s been a fun experience to dig our teeth into! And I feel especially privileged to act alongside Eanna - while she does a very compelling job at playing my on-stage mum, in real life she very much feels like a sister to me.
Jules has such a deep, personal history with this material and these interviews. As a co-lead, how did you find your own 'way in' to the story without feeling like you had to mimic Jules’s specific connection to Holbeck?
EANNA: Well, a strong aspect of this story is intergenerational history and, to an extent, trauma among women in a given family, which I think I could identify and use as a hook for my own connection to the material. In the tense bits and the funny bits, I could see me, my mum and my granny in it too. The way in which Jules has written the mother-daughter dynamic is so skilled that it’s at once universally recognisable while maintaining its specific anchor in its locale, and it allows you to really feel pulled into the story and the lives of these women. I’m Irish but I grew up in Manchester for the first part of my life since I was born – so I got the Northern connection instinctively. My main way in, though, was just lots of conversations with Jules and even her family and friends too about Leeds and Holbeck, her
life growing up, all the work and sensitivity she put into compiling material show from day one– learning has been one of the greatest privileges of doing a show like this.
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| Eanna Ferguson. Photo by Anna Gungaloo. |
You had a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe and are now moving to the Riverside Studios in London. How do you approach the run this time and do you do anything differently?
JULES: We loved playing at the Fringe! The show worked so well as the actual performance space created this really intimate relationship between the audience and us actors. The festival’s overarching tone of comedy also allowed us to raise those elements in the play, which as I touched on before, deepened the later drama and tension.
With our London run, as Eanna mentioned, our directors are experimenting with movement. As a larger venue, our run at Riverside will rely on these subtle moments to really forge connections with audiences. We also have slightly longer to flesh certain elements out, so that’s been useful in recent rehearsals.
The play deals with a divided community response. How has the audience reaction helped shape the piece?
EANNA: Having played in Cambridge to predominantly students, then transferred to the Fringe, it was so rewarding– even emotional– to see different people’s reactions to the play.
I think, naturally, a lot of our peers related with Abbie, but having parents in the audience at Fringe meant a lot of people were more connected to my character, Kate.
Further, the generational differences were really interesting to note. Certain references got more laughs than others, and even recalling news from the 1970s struck chords with older generations. It was just so fulfilling to speak to mothers and hear their praise for Kate’s character. Going to Riverside, I’m really excited to continue having these conversations with audience members.
If the Managed Approach scheme was a character in this play rather than a setting, what kind of person would it be?
JULES: That’s an interesting one. Certainly not a villain, but also not a hero. I think the main word that comes to mind is frantic? Whilst the policy of the Approach was clearly defined, the actual enforcement proved harder than expected. There was also such great discourse over its ethics and existence… So yeah, a frantic person, but a well-intentioned one.
What was the first piece of theatre you remember having a big impact on you?
JULES: Honestly - the Bradford Alhambra Pantomime starring northern pantomime legend, Billy Pearce. Pantomimes are often young people’s first introduction to theatre, and I could talk endlessly about their vital role in cultivating a love of the theatre space. I have vivid memories of watching the panto, brimming with excitement towards the spectacle of it all. So for anyone expecting a highbrow theatre anecdote, I think my love of drama can be traced directly back to the Bradford Alhambra Stalls circa. December 2006!
EANNA: The first piece of theatre, god, I’d have to rack my brain – one of the most profoundly impactful shows I saw was the Abbey Theatre production of Translations in 2022. It’s a play that is very close to my heart – I’d acted (and acted the maggot) all my life but I think that was the night I resolved that I wanted to be an actor properly. I felt this inexorable pull to the material and to just being able to tell a story like that on stage. It’s an old cliché but I’d really felt nothing like it before. Sinéad Cusack and Sophie Okonedo are two very big points of inspiration for me, too. Ben Daniels who I saw recently again in Man and Boy I also think is just one of the most magnificent living actors I’ve had the pleasure of seeing over the years. His performance in that was incredible, so embodied down to the minutiae in a
way that only a real pro can make look so casual and so charismatic. I’ve got a bit of an actor crush on him. Particularly his physical skill of expression is something I find really impressive– and inspired me to attempt to hone mine in this second batch of rehearsals.
I was always very inspired by big presence camp, old-school theatre dames, and had a bank of reference points that came from the older women in my life– everyone from Barbra Streisand, Bea Arthur, Lauren Bacall. I think some of my comedic sensibilities and the ones particularly evident in this show were shaped by that, by what I remember from when I was younger too, Bet Lynch and Rita from Corrie, Jane McDonald, Victoria Wood.
What keeps you both inspired to tell stories like this?
EANNA: It’s the audience reactions– it just feels so rewarding to perform in something that really connects with people. As I said before, transferring to the Fringe was a great opportunity to play in front of different audiences. No matter their age, gender, background, there was something so human about this play that resonated with them.
JULES: I agree, and being the writer, it’s amazing to see the verbatim elements resonate with audiences. Sex workers are so often vilified in the media, especially in discussions around the Approach. Seeing people’s reactions to their testimonies has been a highlight of the play.
What would you hope someone takes away from seeing Managed Approach?
JULES: ‘Empathy’ is the word I always gravitate to when asked this question. I hope the play challenges how people think of sex work and the women who complete it.
EANNA: I agree, and also hope that people leave with a touch of nostalgia. Playing Kate made me pull upon my own experiences with my mother, and I think most people will be able to relate to certain conversations and exchanges Jules and I have on stage.
Managed Approach runs at London's Riverside Studios from Monday 13th until Saturday 25th April 2026. Tickets are available from https://riversidestudios.co.uk/whats-on/Mk-managed-approach/
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