Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird taught us that love and attention are basically the same thing. Miriam Battye toys with this idea in her new play, in which love is misplaced and attention diverted. Though messy and, at times, uncertain, Scenes With Girls is a reminder that friendships deserve as much effort as romantic relationships; we should work to woo our friends regularly.
Phones buzz with notifications as 24-year-olds Lou (Rebekah Murrell) and Tosh (Sex Education’s Tanya Reynolds) lounge around, talking about boys. Avidly dismissive of women who follow “the narrative” by settling down in a relationship, they unpick the patriarchal pressures they face. Lou does so by collecting stories of conquests like conkers, while Tosh – fed up with pretending to be interested – desperately tries to change the subject. She has little success; in a suffocating cycle that satirises the Bechdel test, everything circles back to the men, with each clipped scene mockingly punctuated by Charli XCX’s Boys.
Battye beautifully captures the intense language of best friends. When their former flatmate Fran (Letty Thomas) bumbles in, she trips clumsily on her efforts to join in with the girls’ intricate inside jokes. But it’s hard to see the core of Lou and Tosh’s friendship. Though Murrell and Reynolds are an engaging double act, the wit of their conversation is coated in cruelty, and they talk as if they’re leaving each other voicemails. The play’s convoluted cry to value friends falls flat when their mutually controlling relationship doesn’t seem worth fighting for.
“There’s a better version of this,” says Tosh when boys have taken up so much of their brainpower there is little left for their friends. Worn out by miscommunication, this line speaks for much of the play. Within Battye’s writing is a comic, astute commentary on female friendship, and how much value our twisted society teaches young women to place on the boys they sleep with rather than the friends they call to unpick the events the next day. But as it is, Scenes With Girls refuses to break out of the cliches its characters rail against.
At the Royal Court, London, until 22 February.
