"Scenes with Girls". Burton Taylor

Scenes With Girls. It sounds like an exhibition of paintings, doesn’t it? a series of flattering views of pretty young ladies sketched by Degas, po-faced and static under a leering, male gaze. 

But the only flattering Miriam Battye’s play does is the kind that’s designed to deceive. These scenes are anything but pretty. They’re messy and alive. And that word ‘scenes’ has a double meaning: they’re the 22 sections of the play, sure, but they’re also violent arguments (as in ‘Don’t make a scene!’).

Tosh (Juliet Taub) and Lou (Sanaa Pasha) live together as friends. They share opinions, dreams and even a mutual spoken shorthand – phrases they’ve grown up with (like shouting ‘Willem Dafoe!’) that mean a lot to them but nothing to us. Occasionally, they’re visited by Fran (Georgina Cooper), the friend they both love to hate, and who shares the audience’s sense of being locked out of their smug, Booksmart-inflected little world. And over 22 snapshots of their lives, the backstory gradually comes into view like a lorry careering towards you on the wrong side of the M40, before the emotional pile-up of the final scenes.

It may seem at first that nothing much is happening, but that’s just tradition messing with your brain. This is a new shape for drama, and in the hands of a cast and director who are in tune with Battye’s writing, it’s mesmerising. These aren’t just scenes with girls. These are scenes by girls and for girls. This is friendship painted deeper than love itself. And the most thrilling thing about the play is that it gives us a narrative shape that’s powerfully female. There’s no whopping, phallic plot arc here. The story develops inwards rather than along, in circular, deepening conversations that explore and reveal the characters’ weaknesses, desires and allegiances. Lou’s obsession with sex chips gradually away at Tosh’s friendzone patience, and Fran’s nervous need to be accepted dissolves in a confession of her own abortive marriage plans.

In a knowing dig at the Bechdel test, these women talk about men almost all the time. But this isn’t the simpering sub-speak of a Hollywood rom-com. Lou goes through men like Attila the Hun through a Carpathian village, leaving a trail of exhausted penises in her wake, while Tosh dreams of decapitating Henry the Eighth and planting flowers in his severed spinal cord. Their conversations are the lifeblood of this play. And under Rosie Morgan-Males’s superlative direction, Sanaa Pasha and Juliet Taub create a believable partnership. They are physically intimate, lying on top of each other, massaging heads; and they talk over each other with the familiarity of soul sisters. When they occasionally dip into platitudes, they do so knowingly, as if passingly amused by the predictability of language itself. These women are confident, articulate and educated, so Battye could hardly ask for more ideal actors than this group of Oxford students – actors who understand exactly what she is driving at

This is Rosie Morgan-Males’s final contribution to Oxford drama as an undergraduate director, and her three years here have seen the start of what will surely be an outstanding professional career. Morgan-Males’s work has been prolific (often directing multiple plays in one term) and marked by a natural sensitivity to authorial intention, resulting in productions that feel definitive and involving rather than clever and showy. In Carrion she made us feel as though threatened animals were human. In Sap she addressed the exclusion of bisexuals in the LGBTQ+ community. In Crocodile Tears she revealed the true pain behind an evanescent holiday romance. In A View from the Bridge she embodied Arthur Miller’s mission to give a voice to the inarticulate. At the heart of her work is a passionate concern for real people, and how to depict that reality so that it penetrates an audience’s mind. Scenes With Girls is very much part of that evolution, but it also feels like the most personal of Morgan-Males’s productions to date: a way to say thank you and goodbye to the women she’s worked with over the last three years.

The three actors (plus Ollie Gillam in a one-line contribution of laughter-inducing aplomb) are uniformly, and almost outrageously, brilliant. This production was put together in just one week, working eight hours a day after Finals were completed, and it looks like the result of months of character research. Not only do Pasha, Taub and Cooper convey every nuance of shifting status between Lou, Tosh and Fran, but they also fling the audience from hilarity to tears with consummate skill. We are their emotional marionettes, and they are master puppeteers. Miriam Battye, if you’re reading this (which you’re not), you should come and see your play done properly.

If you go to the theatre in Oxford regularly enough, the barrier between those on the stage and those in the audience starts to break down. The people sitting around you watching the show were themselves performing in the same space last week. Actor and audience meld into one mutually supportive community. The artists may be performing for the public, but they’re also sharing their work with their own colleagues. And they’ll be back themselves to watch another show next week. They’re interested. They care. They’re friends who love each other. That’s what this play is about. And that’s why it’s a play about here.