Playfight Review: Captivating Story of Growing Up

There are raucous teenage kicks in Summerhall’s fringe programme this year, which includes school disco comedy VL and house-party drama The Chaos That Has Been and Will No Doubt Return. Julia Grogan’s Playfight brings a similar mix of adolescent swagger and insecurity then branches out by following its central friendship for 10 years beyond GCSEs. That sweep means it poignantly combines the rush to become an adult ASAP with the sudden surprise that, as one character says, “the more we grow the more I feel like I’m shrinking”.

This is one of those shows where you sense within a minute that you are in safe hands as each element is so assured. Hazel Low’s set, lit by Kate Bonney, has a hot pink ladder for a tree, placed in a bed of wood chips. Roly Botha’s sound design charges up the Roundabout space and Emma Callander’s pacy staging for Grace Dickson Productions and Theatre Uncut is blessed with three actors who immediately command the stage (movement direction by Aline David).

Sophie Cox plays Keira, talking a mile a minute through a tale of fake ID, vodka Red Bulls, losing her virginity on the tennis court and then sharing the video. It felt like a fantasy, she says, breezily rattling off the pornstars she mimicked and how the older boy wanted to hit her. The issues at play here will be carefully unpicked through the course of the hour.

Nina Cassells is Zainab who listens to the story sceptically: “being doggied on a tennis court felt holy?” She was at home with Lucy (Lucy Mangan), whom she is slowly realising she loves as more than a friend, watching David Attenborough’s Blue Planet. Grogan studies human behaviour with an expert eye and knows these characters inside out. Some playwrights’ best bits are in their introductory notes, a little bonus for buying the playtext. Grogan describes Lucy as “like a cloud with legs … Perhaps Lucy fell out of a rabbit hole, or she’s just a product of someone poked about by a Church. Either way, she has a brightness. She’s Air.”

Her lyrical writing sensitively explores the complexities of sexual desires including dangerous activities. The play’s rapid-fire dialogue and blistering humour recall 2015 fringe hit Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour and, likewise, the relationships with religion and the “holy trinity” of shame, blame and guilt are felt as deeply as those with family and friends. Lucy quotes from hymns and the Gospel of Luke but surprises everyone with what happened between her and a choirboy among the gravestones on Mothering Sunday.

The overwrought references to the tree where the girls meet begin to grate but Grogan skilfully balances youthful brashness with fragility, capturing how over the years the friends fall back into the same rhythms when they reconnect. It is played with a punk-rock pace and these three performances are as indelible as teenage dreams.