Three teenage girls are dancing round their bedroom under flashing rainbow lights, squealing over boys, when everything goes dark and the screaming starts. It’s a jolting opening to a play, and it sets the rhythm for everything that follows in Theresa Ikoko’s Girls. You’re laughing one minute and holding your breath the next.
Ikoko’s debut play won the Alfred Fagon Award in 2015, years before she co-wrote the BAFTA-nominated film Rocks. It follows Tisana, Haleema and Ruhab, three best friends taken from their village by militant insurgents. It’s set in Nigeria in 2014, the year Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls. Twelve years on – with around 90 of those girls still believed to be missing – director Ewa Dina brings its first UK revival to the Young Vic’s intimate Maria studio.
Captivity doesn’t stop the trio being teenagers. They act out TV shows to pass the time, handing out roses Bachelor-style, collecting awards for best performance in a hostage situation, and playing newsreaders and politicians who sip water and remind us all to vote. It’s so convincing that you sometimes forget where they are, until Elliot Griggs’ lighting snaps to black, Munotida Chinyanga’s sound design floods the room with men’s voices, or the girls jerk to attention at a noise outside, and you’re yanked straight back into the camp with them.
Hannah Akhalu’s Tisana is the dreamer, forever insisting someone will be coming to help. It’s unsettling how often she drifts off to play on her own while the others get on with surviving. Tara Tijani’s Haleema is the cynic, quick with filthy jokes and quicker to point out that nobody is looking for them. It’s gallows humour at its giddiest, and it’s easy to see why they need it so badly.
Sewa Zamba has the toughest job as Ruhab. Early on she’s got this wide-eyed, childlike awe, her face lit up as if she’s just happy to be with her friends. That makes it all the more painful when she starts slipping out at night to see one of the men in the camp and gets pulled further into its way of life.
Raphaé Memon’s costumes are able to say just as much as the script. The girls start in matching red dresses, but one by one that red gets stripped away. Only Tisana never changes. Even as her whipped back is being bathed, she’s in a red slip, as though the colour has soaked right through her. It’s a quiet, clever touch. The others are slowly being turned into someone else’s idea of a good girl, while Tisana stubbornly stays herself.
And the staging pulls you right into the room. Some of the audience sit on chairs onstage, close enough to catch a wink from the cast. A ceiling of lumpy red papier-mâché hangs overhead like slabs of steak. Behind a faded black curtain sits a wall of old-fashioned TVs that flicker during the newsroom games and crackle with broadcast jingles. They can occasionally pull focus from the actors, but they definitely earn their place by the end. Ikoko’s script has plenty to say about hashtag campaigns and governments that would rather not know, and the girls’ play-acting gives it a light touch without ever letting you forget it’s real.
The final scenes are devastating. As the lights come up, the screens fill with the faces of the real Chibok girls, and nobody seems in any rush to leave.
