Last year Charlie Josephine presented Joan of Arc as a heroic non-binary renegade. Their new play is about the male gaze, especially its effect on adolescent girls. Directed by Julia Head, Flies is a tender and impassioned study of the cusp between girlhood and womanhood. But it takes on too much in 70 minutes and ends up sweeping across the surface and speaking in generalisations.
Cat Fuller’s stage design is set up like a photo shoot, with seven performers captured in a camera’s gaze. It is clear these characters are marooned inside the bounds of the backdrop roll; when they stray beyond it, an explosive flash of the camera sends them scarpering back. This perilous state is made explicit with meta-theatrical references to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
The performers (Afriya-Jasmine Nylander, Annabel Gray, Ellie-Rose Amit, Louisa Hamdi, Pearl Adams, Rosa Amos and Willow Traynor, all excellent) play unnamed characters and speak as one, delivering arguments about and scraps of experiences of objectification, misogyny, shame, consent, body image, pornography and sex.
There are searing moments: repeated reports of men propositioning or leering at 12-year-old girls that never cease to shock, and one voice speaking movingly of observing her mother’s disordered eating (“My mum hates her body, tries her best to teach me to love mine”). Cumulatively it sounds as if we are listening in to the familiar intimacies of a teenager’s bedroom conversation.
A lack of distinction between individual characters is made more glaring as Josephine’s authorial voice asserts itself: “The writer would like to make clear …” is a refrain. There is justification for these writerly interjections but that does not stop them from bringing a certain reductiveness, the singular voice ambushing any sense of plurality or intersectionality. There is little said about class, race or any other differences in relation to the male gaze, unlike in Ryan Calais Cameron’s study of masculinity and the white gaze, For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy.
The play touches, tantalisingly, on Josephine’s non-binary identity (“The writer is wondering if you’re wondering about their body”) but does not take us any further. It begins an intriguing inquiry into the gay female gaze but leaves that dangling too. As a whole, the drama ends up unsatisfying, but there is power in it as a cri de coeur.
At Shoreditch Town Hall, London, until 11 March
