Girls Like That: "Who run the world?"
26 April 2018

by Drew Rowsome - Photos by Cylla von Tiedemann

Girls Like That moves at such a lightning pace, peppered with hilarious one-liners, that it is only after that the bleakness of the vision of playwright Evan Placey (Scarberia) sinks in. The play opens with a lip-sync dance number - one of many that punctuate and facilitate costume changes - wherein we meet the cast, clad in schoolgirl uniforms and exhibiting all the gawky awkwardness and obliviousness of dancing with no-one watching. We are a long way from the bio-drag queen controversy. The music is all female empowerment anthems, with an accent on Queen Bey. That is deliberately ironic.

The characters are seven of the 20 advanced students who attend St Helen's primary school. We meet them at various stages in their lives as the bonds of sisterhood and friendship are tested and eventually torn apart. There are three plot strands that interweave and it is here that Placey's cleverness shows itself: the structure is so tight, studded with clues that cut like razors when rhey recur, that accelerates to a startling denouement that is obvious in hindsight. The main through line is the downfall of Scarlett, the only girl given a name and the only one who is not an archetype, who sends a nude photo to Russell, the jock object of all the girls' desire.

The photo spreads on social media and the nastiness begins. This is a simple plot and Placey begins with a blunt heavy-handed metaphor that could have ended the play in under five minutes. But then he approaches it from another angle. And another. And our sympathies and anger shift from moment to moment. The girls are as apt to insult with "I bet she's still a virgin," as they are to frequently call each other "slut." A nude photo of  Russell appears, possibly in retaliation, online and the girls, and the boys, have a much different reaction than they do to Scarlett's photo. Even Hannah Arendt's theory of the guilt of the bystander is given a contemporary massage. 

The results could easily be didactic and Placey takes a big risk in having the characters speak directly to the audience as narrators as well as characters. But their narration is oblivious, extremely fast-paced, and, for a plot that skips about in time, supplies coherence. The cast is called upon not only to play their basic characters believably at ages five through 40-something, but also to inhabit historical figures, sundry bit players, and, to great comic effect, posturing boys who are also somewhat like that. Director Esther Jun keeps things moving and intensely physical, but the cast's chameleonesque timing is remarkable.

Shakura Dickson as Scarlett has not only the weight of that metaphorical name, but also needs to hold centrestage with only the notoriety of the photo, which we never see, to define her character. The others - Nadine Bhabhas as a self-centred wannabe star, Lucy Hill as an airhead, Rachel Vanduzer as the worrier, Tess Benger as the moral authority with the best ringing non-feminist indictment  - all get lots to play with and with which to enchant. The meanest of the mean girls, Cynthia Jimenez-Hicks (Hello Again), speeds from self-centred innocent to coquette to vicious and back with a flip of her hair or one glance at her ubiquitous cell phone.

Allison Edwards-Crewe is the girl with the moral doubts, the conscience, the girl who felt the most ostracized until Scarlett had the misfortune of disrobing. So it is fabulously ironic and tasty when she gets a number, the context of which can't be revealed but must be seen, that almost stops the show. It would stop the show, if the show weren't a runaway train speeding toward Dickson's big moment where her previous passivity proves to be just a slow burn to a fiery climax. And the audience suddenly realizes how much empathy she has earned by subtly appearing to have done little, by being the one naturalistic performance in a sea of virtuosity.

Though the individual moments of Girls Like That are blunt and unsubtle - the set design and lighting verges on overbearing metaphorically - the overall effect is thought provoking, questioning. And an indictment as much as it is social commentary. The English accents are initially distracting but then the British school system has a hierarchical structure that amplifies the horror. And the accents allow for some jokes at Canada's expense as well as a heartbreaking reference that resonates. Entering the theatre itself, we were warned that the show is "one hour, 45 minutes with no intermission," but when the curtain call began I had to check my watch to verify that fact. We had been royally entertained and given some lingering bitter insights in what felt like a burst of adrenaline.