Review: PLAYFIGHT, Soho Theatre

Three teenage girls gather around an oak tree where they rhapsodise over sex, relationships, and their futures. They could be split parts of a single hormone-soaked psyche, brushing up against each other and pulling each other apart as they traverse the coming of age as women in the hypersexualised 21st century: the era of Pornhub, OnlyFans, and leaked nudes.

Playfight was a Fringe hit. A regional tour followed, and now it lands at Soho Theatre. You can see why it stormed Edinburgh. Grogan illuminates the quirks and rhythms of adolescence with slap happy confidence, poking and prodding at taboo in all their lewd glory. Fringe audiences and critics bombarded by performances at the world’s largest theatre festival will take a liking to an economising script. London is a different universe by comparison. How will it land here?

We meet Kiera gloating about sexual proclivities and sneaking into clubs with ludicrously fake IDs. Zainab is the booksmart closeted lesbian who would rather watch Blue Planet. University beckons her, but first she must untangle her burgeoning romantic feelings for Lucy, a choir-singing Christian who craves the psychological safety of a straight-laced heteronormative relationship.

They are gently united by a shared realisation that the romance of growing up rarely translates to lived reality. The final gathering around their oak tree, here a pink ladder in Hazel Low’s surrealist-tinged set design, becomes a sentimental oasis of nostalgia for their teenage years, but more importantly for the knitted sweater cosiness of their friendship. The original three cast return with sparky fire, Sophie Cox, Nina Cassells, and Lucy Mangans’ earnestness radiates an intoxicating warmth.

But seventy minutes is too little to connect the dots. The tacked-on conclusion about toxic masculinity feels like a sticking plaster solution to tie loose ends rather than a neat narrate finale. The three unseen male characters in Playfight are an alcoholic, a murderer, and a suicide victim. It feels discordantly underdeveloped in the aftermath of the moral panic over Adolescence and when seemingly every other play showcasing in London at the moment has a hot take on male violence. But it’s excusable in Edinburgh where plays are limited to the seventy-minute mark (also worth noting that this was written in 2020).

What’s undeniable is that Grogan is a talented writer. We should all be curious to see what she does next.

Playfight plays at Soho Theatre until 26 April 

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