Exquisitely excruciating. That’s how I’d describe Miriam Battye’s hilarious, bleak portrait of four teenage girls – three 16-year-old virgins, one 17 and not - getting ready in a suburban bathroom to go “out out” in the hope-slash-fear of having sex. The two boys playing video games in the next room suffer different but corresponding anxieties.
Poking an awkward finger into new complications around an immemorial issue, Battye’s writing is a stylised, heightened version of the half-brash, half-childish language of the transitional years: it’s a bit like Peep Show, if the characters were younger, watched Love Island and blurted everything out rather than just thinking it. Jaz Woodcock-Stewart’s production features some terrific young actors and is laugh-out-loud funny for most of its succinct 85 minutes – until suddenly it isn’t.
