Playfight, Soho Theatre Review
Written by Jasmine for Theatre & Tonic
Disclaimer: Gifted tickets in exchange for an honest review
Julia Grogan’s Playfight is a devastating and beautiful play that will resonate with every girl who was ever 15, thinking they were already almost grown up. Few shows that I’ve ever seen have felt so much like spying on my past self. It will remind you of long school lunchtimes chatting under trees, of when you started to choose between going out on fake IDs and watching telly with your mum, and of how you talked and thought about sex before you fully understood what it could or should be.
What Grogan gets so right are the blind spots and how teenage girls are so often opened up to dangerous situations simply because there are little to no safe places to learn about sex, so few places that don’t normalise a version of sex which puts aside their feelings entirely. This play felt so true. That’s the best way I can say it.
It flits through time in the brief windows of the conversations three girls have beneath an old tree over the course of years. Emma Callander’s direction keeps the thread of that space so clear - even where we exist more in the girls’ dreamworlds than in reality we never feel like we are getting lost - through simple shifts she makes it easy for us to follow their mental paths and every scene is set up simply but effectively, really making it feel like you have just opened a window in on an every day moment in their lives. The set from Hazel Low also serves to add a distinct image - the ladder in the centre of the stage, often serving as the tree the girls meet around, creates the sense that it has to be climbed some time or other whilst never interrupting the more naturalistic tone of many of the scenes.
Throughout this show, the story changes as quickly for us as it does for the girls, as its centre - shocking information reaches us in casual conversations, the way it always did when you were at school. Everything is big and small at the same time, because that’s how it feels to them as they try to make sense of how they relate to the world around them. The cast - Nina Cassells, Sophie Cox, and Lucy Mangan carry this so beautifully. They are, by turns, incredibly funny, blunt in the way only teenage girls can be, and so concrete, so complicated, that you can’t help seeing real people in them. They reminded me of being a teenager myself, of girls I used to know, and the sucker punches of this show hit so hard because you feel like they are so real.
I am so glad I got to see this show, and I can only recommend that you go along and do the same thing before they leave the Soho on the 26th. It is a brilliantly told story that will stick in your head long after it is finished. It is the perfect example of why we so badly need more and more stories about women told by women, because I have never seen anyone put the feeling of being a teenage girl on stage better than this.
At Soho Theatre until 26th April 2025
★★★★★
