More women and children are held in slavery today than at any other time in human history. Some, literally locked into sweat shops, work more hours a day than we spend awake, and are allowed just one meal a day. Others, seduced from poverty-stricken provinces with promises of legitimate work in the cities, are imprisoned as prostitutes from very young ages.

Sex trafficking is a multi-million dollar industry and beats drug trafficking because drugs can be sold through the system only once while women and children are sold over and over again. Let’s call it what it is: the rape for profit industry.

Most of the above came from the talk offered by NZ Police detective Robert Earle, after the premiere of No Freedom Without You, written and directed by Joanne Poole. Earle took four years leave to work with an international human rights organisation, often going undercover and posing as a Kiwi businessman on a South East Asian sex tour.

Earle’s experiences underpin much of Poole’s episodic script, which was initially inspired by the film Amazing Grace and William Wilberforce’s memorable observation, that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Theatre is certainly an excellent platform on which to the expose such market-driven obscenities as the modern slave trade. That it has taken an amateur writer/ director to bring it to light with amateur actors is also a commentary on the priorities that drive our mostly market-driven professional theatre industry.

No Freedom Without You methodically depicts a series of telling scenarios:

Three women in a sewing sweat shop (never to appear again) establish the theme as they cope with tiredness. Two schoolgirls, Wan and Jantima, return to their tin shack home and their Mae (mother), where sex trader Ling – "the nice lady who’s been hanging around the school gates" – arrives bearing gifts and the promise of good work for the girls in a safe establishment. Only after she takes both excited girls away does a local man conveniently drop by to explain who Ling really is and what she does. So Mae sings a song: "My dreams for you are broken …"

We also follow the progress of sleazy businessman Mr Jones, bent on more illicit ‘fun’ on his next trip away, to the distaste of his travel agent Fran. He turns up at the place where the sisters are held under threat by their master, Wuttichai, and chooses Jantima so, to protect her little sister, Wan offers herself. Their sexual activities are indicated by their live sound effects from behind a screen. Oh, all the actors wear radio mics, by the way, in stage musical tradition.

Only now does detective Rick come into the picture, at home with his wife Sally, telling her of his decision to take time off to work for the cause. Sally is resistant at first but comes round and they sing a song: "So do what you have to do / Be what you have to be / To set these people free."

Rick teams up with the more experienced Harry who explains what’s what and their plan of action. The dangers they face and the courage they need inspire them, too, to sing a song, in which they put their trust in God to a modified Salvation Army standard.

Inexorably the key players converge on the place there the girls are held. What in reality would have taken months to set up, gathering secretly recorded evidence, is all over in a flash. But Jantima runs away in fright and Rick is only able to deliver Wan home to her Mae. And so to Wan’s final line, to Rick: "I have no freedom without you."

Eleven actors of varying quality – Jariya Willmott as Wan is especially good – play the 13 characters, and a team of stage hands move furniture and screens in music-bridged scene changes that are routinely half as long as the scenes themselves, and largely unnecessary.

Someone told me recently that many amateur theatre practitioners don’t go to professional theatre and this production seems to bear it out, since Wellington has seen in recent years countless multi-scene plays that have used ingenious ways to keep the action flowing, and a great many have been at BATS which cannot be said to have prohibitive ticket prices.

Theatreview’s policy of not reviewing amateur shows, because they are not accountable in the same way professionals are, gives way to the policy of covering as much Fringe theatre as possible, because they are all competing for audiences on the same ‘ticket’ and who knows what gems may be discovered in unusual places.

While there is no point in taking an amateur group to task for not meeting professional standards, this does provide an opportunity to reinforce a point both Laurie Atkinson and I made about BabyCakes: that the development of new writing talent is clearly given a great boost when an excellent actor/ director team bring their skills to a premiere production.

So there we have it: emerging professionals generate delightful entertainment with a comedy about work-mate losers getting drunk on the fringes of a wedding reception, while hard-working amateurs turn out a humdrum production that seeks to confront a global social issue we cannot pretend is irrelevant to us.

What are we to make of this? Is it all down to market forces? I’m not saying homegrown socio-political theatre never gets made in our professional theatres; the likes of Dean Parker and Tim Spite’s SEEyD Company see to that. But is the contemporary professional environment conducive to encouraging our emerging playwrights to consider pursuing themes of great substance and moment?

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