Scenes with Girls, Royal Court Upstairs

[Steve]

I loved this. What appears at first to be a flagrant trolling of the Bechdel test emerges as a thrillingly dark and disturbing portrait of female relations! Excellent new play, with three wonderful performances.

Some spoilers follow. . .

For an all-female production team to start a play called "Scenes with girls" with endless nattering about boys surprised me, as it seemed in such violation of the Bechdel test. I felt a bit judgy, as a consequence, and fell into the play's clever trap.

Because, taken by itself, the overly prescriptive Bechdel test is as useless a measure of quality as the central character, Lou's own prescriptions about relationships. And by goading the audience to be prescriptive, the play tricks us into sharing the lead character's greatest flaw.

Lou, played with vital and glowing self-regard by Rebekah Murrell (no longer the fragile glass ornament she delicately played in Caryl Churchill's "Glass"), refers to a union for life, of one man and one woman, as "the narrative," and in order to assert her individuality, to avoid the boredom of following this societally approved "narrative," she ploughs through boys like a bulldozer.

Meanwhile, her bestie, Tosh (Tanya Reynolds) goes one step further, and not only condemns society's "narrative," but also condemns Lou's supposedly individualistic life choices as just another kind of boring "narrative."

So, God help poor Fran (Letty Thomas), who has a big heart, and actually likes living "the narrative," when she falls into the orbit of these two philosophical tyrants lol. . .

Suffice to say, the play gets very intriguing, and exceptionally dark, demonstrating how we can curb and control each others' behaviours with deft descriptions and calculated words.

Tanya Reynolds is here nothing like the loveable comic foil of a comic book artist she plays in Netflix's "Sex Education." Here she is completely terrifying as an ultra-cerebral girl, boiling in bile, cloaking vast reserves of internal violence with apparent logic and calm.

As different life philosophies come into conflict, the playing of Dido's "White Flag" suggests that one or more of these characters may go down with this ship. . .

Psychologically incisive and deeply disturbing, this is one of the best Upstairs plays I've seen in a while. If you want one, get a ticket before this gets reviewed by the critics tomorrow!

4 and a half stars!

[lonlad]

Great review Steve, as usual! And a fabulous notice up already on The Arts Desk: 4 stars.

[showgirl]

Thank you for the tip, Steve; I'd had my eye on this one but was waiting for opinions/reviews, so having read yours I booked. Still gutted about having to return my Kylie Jenner ticket last year (and there was no extension or transfer - damn!), but the £18 credit from that refund almost paid for this instead.

[Steve]

Jan 22, 2020 13:21:27 GMT showgirl said:

Thank you for the tip, Steve ; I'd had my eye on this one but was waiting for opinions/reviews, so having read yours I booked. Still gutted about having to return my Kylie Jenner ticket last year (and there was no extension or transfer - damn!), but the £18 credit from that refund almost paid for this instead.

Fingers crossed you enjoy the show, Showgirl!

I see the Guardian, previously my one-stop shop for reviews under Michael Billington and Lyn Gardner, awarded this a staggeringly harsh 2 stars! That's really harsh!

Some spoilers follow. . .

Especially harsh, given that the reviewer, Kate Wyver, states that: "Battye beautifully captures the intense language of best friends."

But she then goes on to say, in what I take to be the key passage of her review, that "the play’s convoluted cry to value friends falls flat when their mutually controlling relationship doesn’t seem worth fighting for."

Umm what!?

Where does she get the idea that the play is about "valuing friends!?" :0

At times, it feels more like a warning to steer clear of certain "friends" to me lol! Or at least their behaviours.

It's like the critic decided the play was about "valuing friends," and then gave the play two stars because it wasn't warm and cuddly enough.

This would be like giving a production of Macbeth 2 stars because "it fails in it's convoluted cry to value marriage," or like reviewing the Biblical author's "Cain and Abel" story 2 stars because "it's ode to brotherly love falls flat."

God help Phoebe Waller-Bridge's "Fleabag," if you applied this sort of prescriptive pre-programmed reviewing criteria to judge it!

It's almost as if Ms Wyver invented a "narrative" in her head about how this play should go, and then cruelly cut another person's ideas to shreds based on it's not following her narrative, which ironically is what the characters in this play are most often doing. . .

Further, the show is called "SCENES WITH" girls, which implies that only SOME moments of the characters lives are included, while others are deliberately left out. If an author judiciously leaves out the most heartwarming and cuddly scenes of a friendship in order to laser focus our attention on something else that's disturbing and interesting about friendship dynamics, that we may not have noticed in the usual cloud of cuddly warmth, that's a valid artistic strategy. And in my opinion, very successful here.

There's a moment in this play when Tosh (Tanya Reynolds) says she would sit on people at school to dominate them. Later she lies across her bestie. It looks cosy and cuddly, but as an audience member, you wonder if this is friendship or domination? And the bonding of these girls is so often cruelly about their shared superiority complex over being better than someone else.

This play makes all motivations suspect, and friendship feel creepy. That's its success.

In my opinion lol!

[showgirl]

Well, I don't know whether I'm too old or what but I hated this and even from the first few minutes feared I'd made a terrible mistake and wished there was a way of leaving unobtrusively. Of course I stuck it out to see and given the venue, configuration and lack of interval, it would have been hard to make a discreet departure. Probably the worst aspect for me was the inauthentic dialogue: in the initial scene this came across more like someone cramming as many nouns into a sentence as possible and not making sense anyway, rather than seeking genuinely to communicate ideas. Then there was all the effing: I can cope with a bit but one of the three characters swore excessively which also seemed unrealistic and unpleasant. As for the way the central pair interacted: that their relationship was claustrophobic and probably "toxic" as we would now say, was one of the writer's points, but what unpleasant people to be closeted with for 80 minutes. If this is what some young women are like now, I'm glad that none of those I know seem remotely similar.

This play now has the dishonour of becoming one of my worst 3 ever in the Theatre Upstairs at this venue, joining Pests and The Village Bike. Oddly, though I've seen a variety of plays downstairs too, they never strike me as so variable in quality, whereas when upstairs is good, it's brilliant, and when it's bad it's dire.

[Deleted]

Really glad I caught this, I loved the heightened dialogue and the way those shared language aspects led to both belonging and control. In a way, this reminded me of another Court debut, Butterworth’s Mojo, back in the nineties. The violence inherent in both plays, tending to the brutally psychological variety, in this instance, rather than bodies in bins.

Having spent a lot of time in a similar milieu, this is an all too plausible picture of the power games that the hyper intelligent can play. I hope to catch up with what the writer does next.