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A large, hot-pink ladder dominates Hazel Low’s simple set for Julia Grogan’s buzzy, touching new drama Playfight (which turned heads at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe). It stands in for the old oak tree under which three schoolgirls — Keira (Sophie Cox), Zainab (Nina Cassells) and Lucy (Lucy Mangan) — regularly meet. But it’s also reflective of the storyline which traces the steps of the friends as they climb — and stumble — towards adulthood.
When we first meet them, they are 15 and preoccupied by GCSEs (a little) and sex (a lot). Keira, the brashest of the three, has just lost her virginity to an older boy on the tennis court. Her friends are both awestruck and troubled: churchgoing Lucy’s attitude to sex is complicated by worries about sin; Zainab is realising she likes girls and is scared that her rigidly disapproving mother will find out. And while Keira, who seems to have no filter, brags in detail about the momentous event, there’s a violent edge to what she describes. Then she makes the fundamental error of sharing the video.
We drop in on them multiple times over the next decade, as they discuss GCSE results, A-levels, university, love and commitment. Keira seems to have screwed up the most, yet she ends up pretty grounded. That’s not the case for Lucy, who makes a catastrophic decision. Watching on meanwhile is Zainab, always observant, hard-working and sensible — but quietly breaking her heart in unrequited love.
In some senses, Grogan’s play — terrifically well performed in Emma Callander’s production — feels like a sister play to Red Pitch, Tyrell Williams’s drama about teenage boys. It’s fizzingly funny and very frank — these girls swear and share copiously — but also tender. The passage from childhood to adulthood can be such a fragile one: the heart is readily bruised and it’s easy to mess up enormously. The girls try on different ideas of what it means to be an adult — having sex, leaving home, studying, settling down — their friendship buffeted by their shifts in circumstances. And running through it are the specific dangers for young women today, such as the prevalence of violent porn.
Callander’s deft direction brings out the tiny shifts in the girls’ body language that reveal underlying uncertainties, regrets and fears. Cox gives a firecracker performance as Keira, but moments of quiet let you see the vulnerability beneath the tough talk. Mangan has a kind of fragility and dreaminess; Cassells brings a wonderful stillness to her watchful character.
You can feel the darkness underneath the play’s bubbling surface and in the end it breaks out. The terrible weight of what happens is a lot for the piece to carry and it doesn’t quite manage it — it feels too abrupt. But this is still a cracker: a wickedly funny, caring piece about friendship and about being young and female today.
★★★★☆
To April 26, sohotheatre.com
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