I wouldn’t really say Miriam Battye’s comedy The Virgins reminded me of my own teenage years, although to be fair this is probably because I was never a teenage girl. However, it did make me laugh a lot.
Rosie Elnile’s set is divided into two rooms of the same unremarkable house, with a corridor in the middle. In the lounge, Joel (Ragevan Vasan) is silently playing on a console with his random mate Mel (Alec Boaden). In the kitchen, his teenage sister Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti) and her friends Jess (Alla Bruccoleri) and Phoebe (Molly Hewitt-Richards) are getting ready for a big night out.
The boys are not the focus here. The girls – clever, wordy, neurotic, virgins – are painstakingly crafting a plan to go out and get… snogged. They are smart and irrational, sweet and maddening as they try to naively micromanage their journey to adulthood. They’re treating kissing boys – and maybe more than kissing if it comes to it – as a sort of military operation to be planned, accomplished and ticked off. Deploy troops, storm the building, bring them home. But in part that’s their brains denying their actual horniness – for starters Jess is certainly incapable of vocalising the fact she obviously has a crush on Joel.
It’s hard not to see The Inbetweeners as casting a bit of a shadow here: I’m not saying Battye has even seen or been directly influenced by the C4 sitcom about a similarly aged, similarly neurotic group of boys, but at the least it’s a pretty good reference point for the tone of the comedy. It's a very funny play, in large part thanks to Hewitt-Richards as the saucer-eyed Phoebe, who goggles at almost anything anybody says about sex, keeps a file of school gossip on her phone, and persistently slips into the lounge to stare in confusion at the boys.
The three girls might have had a perfectly nice night on their own, but unfortunately Chloe has invited Zoe Armer’s Anya. A silky assassin from the year above with a perfect figure, seemingly unshakable self-confidence, and a habit of speaking in menacing Gen-Z-isms (her favourite one is quizzically declaring ‘twist?’ every time somebody does something she’s not expecting), she’s like a full grown shark to the other girls’ innocent little fishes.
But she, like everyone here, has trauma; the much darker second half isn’t so much about big speeches and massive revelations, as it is a shift from ha ha funny dysfunction to exploring how uncomfortable sex and intimacy can be as a young person. It feels on less steady ground here, I’d say. I might have misread the intended tone, but the play ends on what feels like a bleak, somewhat scolding note. Maybe that’s because intimacy between teenagers who don’t really know what they’re doing (or what they want,) just does look pretty depressing to an adult.
If it ends on a slightly murky place, it’s still a fine play and a perfect fit with comedy Mecca Soho Theatre: funny, concise, stacked with rising talent. And very accessible: Battye has written a lot for TV and it shows, in a good way. What gives it a theatrical shot in the arm is Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s direction. She keeps things fairly naturalistic and smartly gauges the amount of overlapping action in the two rooms that an audience is likely to follow. But her big innovation is repeatedly deploying a thunderously loud orchestra recording plus blackout - at the end of scenes, during scenes, virtually during sentences… it gives even the most banal conversation a note of ludicrously heightened melodrama - which is of course exactly what it’s like to be a teenager.
