It’s all right like, innit
Summer Fling has the honour of being the final play of the Student Theatre at Glasgow’s New Works Festival 2025. Written and directed by last year’s winner, Grace Donaldson, Summer Fling is a fifty-minute play centring on four contestants on a dating show, Maisie, Donna, Ollie and Aaron. A parody of the likes of Love Island, it aims to highlight issues such as exploitation on television and societal gender norms.
The first thing to note about Summer Fling is just how funny it is. Every other line generates laughter, and it’s impressive how consistent it is at being funny. The energy never falters, and you feel the actors feeding off the audience to deliver each line with increasing relish, safe in the knowledge that they have connected.
This is especially true of George Rogers who plays Aaron, a landlord and influencer. He’s also an all-round piece-of-work. With Aaron fancying himself a lothario, Rogers adopts an expression that’s never far away from a smirk, and dispenses co-opted feminist language to talk about himself and only himself in a magnificently manicured manner. He’s a joy to watch, with Donaldson and Rogers understanding that the key to Aaron is he can never come out on top.
It’s also in Aaron that you first detect the cracks in this play. He’s hilarious, yes, but his character never expands beyond your first impressions of him. No further insight can be gleaned from Aaron because none is ever offered. This wouldn’t be an issue if it isn’t true of most of the characters. Ollie’s earnest and simple in every sense of the word, while Donna’s sexually liberated and confident, but again, you understand that quickly and as time goes on, you’re disappointed that’s all there is to them. At times, there’s almost too much of an insistence on getting laughs at the expense of the characters.
The way the underlying issues are dealt with follows a similar path. Topics such as the unacceptability of anything outside the heteronormative binary is touched on with a few witty comments but falls shy of making a real point. There’s also an unfortunate heavy-handedness. In a scene where the boys and girls bond in their rooms, they’re bathed in blue and pink light, respectively. It’s almost too obvious, and when the Voice from the producers lays down the law as to unacceptable behaviour, the spotlight goes red, crossing the line to much too obvious.
The only character with complexity is Maisie, who goes from sincere girl who’s been hurt to manufactured ingenue to backstabbing narcissist. Wonderfully played by Lola Gibbons, a frequent collaborator ofDonaldson’s, she makes you believe in Maisie even as Maisie descends to murder. Gibbons uses her entire body in her acting, always fluid and sure in her movements, whether that’s in modestly crossing her legs during a confessional, in conveying the genuine connection Maisie and Ollie have through embraces, or in the full-bodied rant Maisie throws when she’s refused victory.
Through Maisie, you are shown the effects that dating shows can have on otherwise good people. She’s led by the Voice, booming from above, that tells her exactly what the viewing audience want of her if she wants to win. She’s fabricated into something artificial, pushed to break the hearts of friends, only to be denied at the very end because it’s still not good enough for the ratings. The closing scene evokes Carrie, a girl in the spotlight in a light-coloured dress drenched in blood, having committed the sin of growing up. Is it any wonder she snaps, like so many in real life have?