"A Girl in School Uniform (Walks into a Bar)". BT Studio

A Girl in School Uniform (Walks into a Bar) is a disorienting title for an unnerving play. It sounds like it might be the first line of a joke, but there’s nothing funny about the situation here. It’s an unnamed dystopian future – or present – in which blackouts for which we do not know the reason occur regularly, young women are murdered, and there are constant oblique references from the two characters on stage to ‘the way things are’. It’s a clash of innocence and experience (a schoolgirl and a barmaid), and over the course of the play those two forces joust with mingled suspicion and affection.

The title is also perhaps deliberately reminiscent of the ground-breaking 1932 German film Mädchen in Uniform, an early LGBT drama in which a schoolgirl and a young female teacher discover maturity and sexual awakening while the world outside the school is descending into violence and chaos.

The power cuts and blackouts that dominate and terrify the population of this imagined world are a dual presence in the production: first they feature as real, diagetic blackouts experienced within the world of the play, causing the characters, Bell and Steph, to talk either in darkness or with tiny torches. But they also appear as theatrical darkness, clicking on and off to signal the passage of time between scenes. With so much darkness creeping into the action, the blackouts have a genuine power all of their own, like a third character, and seem to spur Bell and Steph into a new way of communicating. In the light they are wary, deceptive, reticent. In the dark they are creative, sharing, trying to trust each other through improvised stories that hint at an answer to the main question of the play: what has happened to Steph’s best friend Charlie?

With so much ambient light trickling its way into the Burton Taylor Studio, it’s a shame that full blackout can’t be achieved. We can still see Bell moving around her bar even when the lights are off, which reduces the impact of the lighting change. And on the technical front there is also an issue with a very noisy sound system which hums and crackles even when it’s supposed to be silent, interfering with audibility.

This didn’t detract from two excellent acting turns from Molly Jones and Katie Rahr-Bohr. Their intense performances, the scale of the production, and the simplicity of the set made this feel like the ideal play for the BT.

Lulu Raczka’s writing is bold and intelligent: it captures all the threat of the theatre of cruelty, while simultaneously allowing its two female protagonists to create a kind of cocoon of love and trust within the darkness of the bar. While they jointly improvise, re-wind and re-create possible scenarios about the missing Charlie it can get a little repetitive: I found myself wishing they would stop making up stories and get to the real denouement. But then, maybe that’s part of the whole point of the play. Who gets to decide what is fiction and what truth in a world where there are no answers you can trust? It seemed somehow fitting that while this play was being performed, outside in the ‘real’ world Donald Trump was found to have committed sexual abuse, but declared his absolute innocence on a self-made social media platform called ‘Truth’. I’m glad the girl in school uniform didn’t walk into his bar.