REVIEW
Playfight
Soho Theatre (studio)
Emma Callander (director)
70 (length)
10 April 2025 (released)
5 d
Soho Theatre stages Playfight, written by Julia Grogan Directed by Emma Callander.
The play centres around a tree (staged brilliantly by a single pink ladder in the middle of the stage) where three school friends, meet to talk about life, love, masturbation (a lot about masturbation!) As they grow up and becomes young adults around this tree, we see their wildly different characters mature. Keira is the one defined by her attractiveness to boys, Lucy a Christian and a dreamer, who has met a boy at church, and Zaineb, the sensible high achiever who is coming out as lesbian, whilst living with her deeply homophobic mother.
The three actors, Sophie Cox, Nina Cassells and Lucy Mangan, are incredible, showing both the innocence and naivety of youth and its energy and imagination. The girls want to fall in love, lose their vignity, go to uni. Yet, as time and events take their toll on the girls, we see them change and grow apart.
In its short timeframe, (the play is only just over an hour long) it manages to cover every topic of modern adolescence. From milestones like exam results and first kisses to school gossip, bad poetry writing and family dramas, the play takes us through it all at pace. Alcoholism, drugs, the pressures of social media, male violence against women, and suicide, all feature as a backdrop. It feels like you want to dive deeper into all of these topics, but it also feels just right that they are all bubbling away without a chance to go into too much detail, just like they are for busy, anxious, young people today.
The writing is stunning, at turns hysterically funny, then suddenly poignant and heart breaking. Grogan disarms us with her humour and then hits the viewer with a sucker punch of a dark emotional storyline, and then with the swift pace of the play we are rushed on to the next snapshot in time.
For a debut this play is a wonder. A coming of age story about female friendship, sexuality and the trails of tribulations of being a teenager. Men and women will be taken back to their adolescence, invited to laugh and cry with the three characters, but just like adolescence itself, not dwell too much on any one event.
The play centres around a tree (staged brilliantly by a single pink ladder in the middle of the stage) where three school friends, meet to talk about life, love, masturbation (a lot about masturbation!) As they grow up and becomes young adults around this tree, we see their wildly different characters mature. Keira is the one defined by her attractiveness to boys, Lucy a Christian and a dreamer, who has met a boy at church, and Zaineb, the sensible high achiever who is coming out as lesbian, whilst living with her deeply homophobic mother.
The three actors, Sophie Cox, Nina Cassells and Lucy Mangan, are incredible, showing both the innocence and naivety of youth and its energy and imagination. The girls want to fall in love, lose their vignity, go to uni. Yet, as time and events take their toll on the girls, we see them change and grow apart.
In its short timeframe, (the play is only just over an hour long) it manages to cover every topic of modern adolescence. From milestones like exam results and first kisses to school gossip, bad poetry writing and family dramas, the play takes us through it all at pace. Alcoholism, drugs, the pressures of social media, male violence against women, and suicide, all feature as a backdrop. It feels like you want to dive deeper into all of these topics, but it also feels just right that they are all bubbling away without a chance to go into too much detail, just like they are for busy, anxious, young people today.
The writing is stunning, at turns hysterically funny, then suddenly poignant and heart breaking. Grogan disarms us with her humour and then hits the viewer with a sucker punch of a dark emotional storyline, and then with the swift pace of the play we are rushed on to the next snapshot in time.
For a debut this play is a wonder. A coming of age story about female friendship, sexuality and the trails of tribulations of being a teenager. Men and women will be taken back to their adolescence, invited to laugh and cry with the three characters, but just like adolescence itself, not dwell too much on any one event.
