Edinburgh Fringe 2024
Playfight
Grace Dickson Productions and Theatre Uncut
Genre: Drama, New Writing
Venue: https://www.summerhall.co.uk/
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
Theatre in the round at Roundabout, three teenage girls clustered around an oak tree at the centre of the stage, negotiating their passage through teenage years to adulthood. This beautifully written play speaks loudly and clearly about girls’ experience as they come of age and become sexually active, and above all, of the importance of female friendship.
Review
A shocking pink ladder holds centre stage surrounded by wood chippings representing an oak tree. Three teenage girls get together there regularly, away from the constraints of school and family.
Keira (Sophie Cox), Zainab (Nina Cassells) and Lucy (Lucy Mangan), are fifteen years old, when we meet them – all plukes and raging hormones. All three give solid performances that are heartfelt, funny and full of energy.
Keira is the ‘fast’ one, determined to do everything first and not to hold onto her virginity for a moment longer than necessary. Zainab is quieter, more thoughtful with a strict family background and a secret that gradually emerges in the play. Lucy is religious and wonders if she’ll ever orgasm – and if she does whether that’ll be OK with God.
They meet around the oak tree, sharing confidences about everything from their aspirations to their family lives but mostly about sexual activity. It’s frequently funny and sometimes shocking as the girls unwittingly share their vulnerabilities as well as their burgeoning sexuality. With the sense of immortality that comes with youth, they play out their fantasies and realities oblivious to any dangers. Not sure what’s normal and what’s not, a slap in the face from her boyfriend feels like just part of their lovemaking to Lucy – and it’s not challenged by her friends. It’s all just playfighting, until suddenly it’s not.
Julia Grogan had a Fringe hit last year with Gunter which she devised with the company, Dirty Hare but this is her first solo play. Her crackling script leaps off the page with dialogue that feels real and funny. It walks a delicate tightrope between the times when the girls have no filter and just open their mouths and spit out whatever’s on their minds, or the times when they hold back or embroider the truth in the way that teenage girls do when they’re either embarrassed or ashamed or both. She paints a vivid picture of teenage girls and their emergent female activity in a society where male dominance and violence is ever present as part of the backdrop.
Emma Callendar’s direction makes good use of the Roundabout stage and its entrances and exits. She keeps the pace fast and the actors moving (so much so that it can be too easy to miss the rapid scene changes amid the fast paced dialogue). This is an important production from Julia Grogan, Theatre Uncut and Grace Dickson Productions that illuminates the tentative steps towards sexual activity in a world where male violence is increasing and increasingly tolerated.
The pink ladder, the oak tree is always there solidly centre stage, an unmoving object in a rapidly changing landscape – a paean perhaps to female friendship and to the bonds that keep us going through the hardest of times.
