Miriam Battye’s hilarious script is brought to life by Jaz Woodcock-Stewart in a split scene play that simultaneously makes you squirm and want to run on stage to hug the characters.
This one-act play by new writer Miriam Battye at Soho Theatre initially appears reminiscent of a GCSE performance, but from the first line it transforms into a profoundly raw story about the awkwardness and nuances of growing up and encountering sexuality.
Between a bathroom, a corridor, and a living room, The Virgins follows four teenage girls over the course of a night while they get ready to go ‘out out’.
School friends, Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti, loud wannabe), Jess (Ella Bruccoleri, self-assured yet reserved), and Phoebe (Molly Hewitt-Richards, anxious but kind) are bound in sisterhood by their girlishness and shared innocence.
Chloe’s brother, Joel, and his gym friend, Mel, sit stage right laconically playing Xbox as the girls get ready while discussing the complexities of losing their virginities.
Woodcock-Stewart’s diverse cast transports the audience back to a time, generally better forgotten than rehashed, with unnerving accuracy.
As the girls dress in purple tights and sequin tops, they eagerly await the arrival of older girl Anya (Zoë Armer, sexy and complicated) to take them to the club.
When Anya arrives, she floors the girls with her confidence and ease, especially around Joel (Ragevan Vasen, curious and obscure) and Mel (Alec Boaden, laddish and moody).
However, Anya quickly realises that the three girls are at a very different stage to her and threaten to be the ‘cumbersome’ virgins that often bore her on a night out.
Changing her tack, Anya, the cool-girl disrupter turned confidante, demonstrates blowjobs using toothbrushes and encourages the girls to claim their power by asking them, ‘what do you want?’.
Meanwhile the boys play video games, interrupted occasionally by Mel’s advice about girls, suggesting that in the modern day, the best thing is to ‘do nothing’ to avoid getting in trouble. Joel is also a virgin and fears being inexperienced at his age. Mel advises lazily but to Joel, with no experience, his advice is god-given.
Throughout, there is an authentic interplay between tenderness and meanness that rings true to the teenage experience of silliness, rage and pent-up emotions, intensified by Anna Clock’s soundtrack.
Battye’s characterisation provides something for everyone; the poser, the sensitive, the naive, the people pleasers, the leader and the followers. This play is fiercely honest and vulnerable. A twist at the end gives this play a didactic message: it is not always the loudest or the most confident person who ends up winning the prize.
If you take the plunge to bring some crude laughter to your week, be prepared for hand jobs on stage and some pretty raw experimenting with sex positions – this is not one to take your granny to.
Or maybe it is, because she has probably been there too. The script and direction is so good, it can only have been put together by people who have experienced it all before.
With an impressive repertoire including current stage adaptations of The Glass Menagerie and Gulliver’s Travels (in German), a theatre company of her own and various awards, Woodcock-Stewart does not drop the ball with The Virgins.
This play is light-hearted but speaks to something deeper that is the universal discomfort involved in coming of age.
Featured image courtesy of Soho Theatre.