When speaking about Playfight to others, I’ve described it as one word: girlhood. Three friends who have grown up together, meet regularly at the tree, and we watch, as they navigate friendship, school, and love through their most vulnerable years. Written by Julia Gorgen, Playfight has been shortlisted and won multiple awards including being a finalist for both the Theatre Uncut Award and the Papatango Prize. Its Gorgen’s debut play and it is a belter. Powerful, heartbreaking and utterly human, the story sweeps you up, punches you in the gut and leaves you gasping for breath.
Zainab, Keira and Lucy burst onto the Roundabout stage, and immediately you’re gripped by their tidbits of secondary school gossip, advice on orgasms and missteps in finding out who they are as girls become women. The oak tree, represented by a hot pink stepladder, has seen it all, from them, and the many generations of girls and women before them. The play begins with Keira recounting how she lost her virginity to an eighteen-year-old boy. Fifteen herself and having filmed the encounter and sending it as proof to another teenage girl, it leaves her friends with questions and ultimately it leads to its own tragedy.
The play soars through their teenage years, as they grow in different directions both in school, university and love. Keira opts out of following her friends to further education, and slowly builds an online brand in fetishes to save enough for her to get out of their hometown. Zainab, the most pragmatic of the three, works hard to get a spot at university, and like Keira, can’t wait to leave. Zainab assumes that Lucy, the third, feels the same about leaving, but decides to marry her high school boyfriend, whom she met at church. This description I’ve written here feels reductive because there’s so much more in between all these moments that depict their complicated entanglements and growing pains.
Nina Cassells, Sophie Cox and Lucy Mangan are stellar. Each character is handled with such care, their flaws and virtues are laid bare for us to receive. The direction by Emma Callander is equally beautiful and the script is expertly woven. If there’s one line that will haunt me, it will be “What if I don’t want these roots?” Because when I grieve my friends who have been hurt by their partners, when I remember the way I spoke about girls in my school and the way they spoke about me, when I look around at a world that wishes women would stay on their knees, I think I never wanted these roots.
Playfight is on at the Roundabout, Summerhall, from August 1 – 26 at 17.30.
Buy tickets here.
Image by Michael Windsor Ungureanu provided by Summerhall.