"Love Me?" Burton Taylor Studio

School life has been responsible for an incredibly broad range of drama, from the musical nostalgia of Daisy Pulls It Off to the life-affirming sparkle of Booksmart, to the social realism of Kes. (And let's not forget the suicidal hilarity of Welcome to the Dollhouse while we're at it - one of the most painful and brilliant dissections of school bullying you'll ever see.) 

Deborah Acheampong has added to the canon with a kind of fever dream of 6th-form catastrophe, in which a group of girls at an exclusive single-sex school drink, fuck, kill, party and impregnate themselves into oblivion. As one of them says, 'You're like a Boeing heading straight into the ground.' It's Heathers meets Twitter while reading Donna Tartt.

This is undoubtedly an ambitious project. The trouble is, it's almost too ambitious. It flits between satire, drama, comedy and tragedy with no sense of control. It throws up morsels of plot that seem to be incredibly important, and then drops them for no apparent reason. One of the key early events is that a girl who is being initiated into the club dies of an overdose at the hands of the other characters... and nothing seems to happen as a result. They hardly seem affected. And there's certainly no response from the school or the police. Later, one of the characters gets pregnant. A big deal is made of her decision to keep the baby. At a scan she learns it only has one eye. And... that's the last we ever hear of that. A male character, Emilio, seems to be a caricature of a particular type of man. He even has a couple of solo scenes. And then... gone.

I have to confess, I wasn't sure afterwards if this was just me being too old and not getting it, or was it all actually like that Boeing heading into the ground. I chatted with some students who were also on their way out, and they were equally frustrated.

And yet... There's something in there. There's an original and powerful voice yelling somewhere in all that mess. It's a bit like one of those garden sprinklers spinning around, just getting everything indiscriminately wet. At least it's still producing water, the stuff of life.

This is not a great play. But I'm glad I saw it. As a relatively new writer, Deborah Acheampong has much to learn. But you know what? This is how that learning happens.