BE CAREFUL what you say when playwright Alecky Blythe is in the room, she might be tempted to use your words in her next production.

Meeting the Hackney-based writer after rehearsals for her latest play, The Girlfriend Experience, which is currently enjoying a run at the Young Vic, I can’t help but see the irony in writing down everything she says to me to piece together this article, just as she would use a series of interviews to create a play.

For The Girlfriend Experience, Alecky has edited more than 100 hours’ worth of material recorded inside a seaside brothel. It follows on from her award-winning success with Come Out Eli about Hackney gunman Eli Hall, who died in January 2003 after holding police at bay for 15 days. That featured taped contributions from more than 40 eye-witnesses to the siege.

The Girlfriend Experience is a challenging performance for the actors who are asked to repeat edited dialogue of people in the brothel on stage as accurately as possible.

Alecky, who was born in Epping and trained as an actress at Mountview, took her actors to the brothel and all were enlightened by the experience.

“Meeting the women in the parlour was a real breakthrough because it gave me the setting,” says Alecky. “It’s a seaside location and these good old-fashioned working class British women feel under threat from the influx of skinny Eastern Europeans. It’s not a cosmopolitan area; there’s no mix of cultures and for all they do, the working girls are all weirdly traditional. They like to watch Midsomer Murders and have a cup of tea and a chat straight after having slept with some stranger.”

Actress Debbie Chazen, who was born in Wembley, but now lives in Golders Green, plays Tessa. Her previous work includes starring in the BBC comedy sketch series Tittybangbang and in Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy.

She recalls the day they went down.

“We went as a group and it was a nice seafront flat with a couple of bedrooms. We’d already heard their voices and done work on being them but to see them was like, wow. They were more nervous than we were; nervous about being judged.

“Tessa has been a working girl all her life and is now renting her own parlour. It starts off fairly positively for her but then it gets harder and she has to move her teenage daughter into the brothel. Also she has this golden rule that you never date a punter and then she does and has a really rough time. Then after that there’s a succession of dirty old men and she has a mini breakdown.”

After the play finishes Alecky has a National Theatre commission to work on and The Girlfriend Experience has recently been optioned by production company to be made into a TV comedy. Does Alecky feel it is a good subject for comedy?

“There’s a lot of darkness in the play, but it’s also incredibly poignant. You’re laughing at something that’s quite horrific and you’re not sure if you should be laughing, but like these women, you have to have a strong sense of humour and use it, otherwise you’d think too much about the craziness of what you have to do.”

The Girlfriend Experience runs until Saturday, August 15 with performances at 7.30pm and matinees Saturday and Wednesday.