REVIEW: Scenes with Girls at The Hen & Chickens Theatre 3-7 November

“Scenes With Girls gives female friendship the respect it deserves.” ★★★★

Miriam Battye’s Scenes with Girls celebrates the richness and significance of female friendship. The pseudo rom-com first premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 2020 and delivers its poignant ideas about sex, identity, and heteronormativity through a stream of rapid-fire dialogue and jokes. 

Per its title, Scenes with Girls consists of dozens of scenes dedicated to best friends and flatmates, Lou (Molly Rex) and Tosh (Caity O’Meara). The first scenes are quick. Snapshots of the girls' friendship create a supercut of extreme closeness, a window into a private world of gossip and inside jokes. These moments of platonic intimacy fly by like the early days of a budding romance. Of course, with any couple, bliss is unsustainable. As conflict escalates over the course of the play's 90-minutes, individual scenes become longer and more lived-in.

A central tenet of Battye’s script is the idea that friendship is as nuanced and meaningful as romance, with the potential to be equally damaging. To this end, Scenes with Girls applies traditional romance tropes to a story of friendship to underscore the parallel complexities and depth. Lou and Tosh are more than just friends. They are each other's port of emotional and physical safety. They are soulmates but not lovers and, as the play asserts, society does not make space for soulmates who are not lovers. Unlike society, Scenes with Girls acknowledges the profoundness and nuance of friendship, particularly female friendship, and the role of sex in a meaningful relationship is a core provocation.

Scenes with Girls is a fresh addition to the cultural landscape, while evoking Lena Dunham’s Girls. Like Dunham, Battye’s characters are nuanced and lifelike, if grating and unlikeable. The characters in Scenes with Girls repeatedly choose inane “boy talk” over substantive discourse about themselves, their lives, or their world. This pattern is frustrating but entirely intentional; in order to comment on the sexual obsession and/or repression that the patriarchy inflicts on young women, Scenes with Girls must mirror it. The show is a brilliantly accurate reflection of contemporary 20-something women with the given byproduct that the characters, therefore, think and act like 20-something women.

Under Lucy Harper’s direction, the production of Scenes with Girls on at The Hen and Chickens Theatre lives up to the full potential of Battye’s script.  Superb set design combined with an immersive soundtrack of millennial hits ground the play in clear time and place. O’Meara and Rex are electric as the central duo. Both actresses bring their respective characters to life with pathos, relatability, and brilliant comic timing. Rachel Mertens joins in later scenes as Fran, an “ex” of the friend group, so to speak. In just a few appearances, Mertens’s excellent performance leaves an outsized impression and expands the impact of the central dynamic into the surrounding world. Brandon Pascal rounds out the cast as the sole - largely placeholder - male character.

Scenes with Girls posits that the steadfast friends who are integral in the formation of the female identity play a far more substantive role in our life story than the men who come and go. Gender aside, it's a must-see for anyone who has ever had a friend change their life. Scenes with Girls is on at The Hen & Chickens Theatre 3rd - 7th November. Tickets are available at https://unrestrictedview.co.uk/events/scenes-with-girls.