EDINBURGH 2021: Review: CASH POINT MEET, Fringe Player

Cash Point Meet is the debut play by Niamh Murphy about two Irish girls that find themselves involved in sex work.

Emma (Niamh Murphy) is working the night shift in McDonalds. After cleaning up piles of vomit and being flashed by a homeless woman, she realises that she can't put up with this for much longer. Her flatmate Sinéad (Ava Hahessy Madigan) feels the same, a struggling artist who barely has the fare to get home from her networking events.

Then they stumble upon cash point meet. This is a term where a man is looking for a woman to meet him at an ATM, humiliate him and take his money off him. It sounds too good to be true for the girls. At first, Sinéad has her doubts about the whole thing but Emma points out that she'd have to work 8 hours a day unblocking toilets to earn similar money as doing this a few hours a week. She insists it's empowering to be able to take this money off of these men, and they're always making sure they do it safely. Both actors are excellent and work so well together. The gentrification of Dublin is highlighted as they check available flats online and find the only options on anything resembling a normal wage mean sharing a home with 15 other people.

The girls are quite far into the work when they start to address it as sex work. Yes, the men obviously get a thrill from it, but it's not like they're touching them, is it? This is where the play really starts to have an impact. Emma seeks out support groups for sex workers and discovers that they have been in denial as cis white women. They learn the problems that the laws in Ireland are inflicting on young immigrant women. Emma becomes heavily involved in the activism and political side of things as Sinéad takes a step back from the work altogether.

Cash Point Meet makes for an incredibly gripping, educational and timely piece of theatre.

Cash Point Meet is available on demand via Fringe Player from 12 August.

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