The most honest conversations of the night don’t happen on the dancefloor. FLUSH knows this. So does every woman in the audience
The women’s bathroom has always operated as a confessional – secrets exchanged between strangers over shared lipstick, governed by the tacit understanding that whatever happens here stays here. April Hope Miller’s FLUSH simply formalises the jurisdiction. Set entirely within the graffiti-lacquered cubicles of a Hackney club over the course of one night, it asks five performers to inhabit sixteen women, a ratio that ought to buckle under its own ambition. It does not.
The sixteen are not a crowd so much as a cross-section of underage teenagers, a hen party unravelling at the seams, thirtysomethings, a work party, queer and trans lives mid-navigation one American trying to locate herself in a city that extends no particular welcome. That each feels like a complete person rather than a type is as much a credit to Miller’s writing as to the cast’s precision. The sheer breadth of what Miller fits inside a single bathroom on a single night from eating disorders and plastic surgery, boys, girls and bosses, drugs and drinks, the readjusted skirt and the quietly suppressed sob – every variety of girlhood and womanhood appears to pass through these cubicles eventually, and the cumulative effect is something close to a portrait of the whole. The costuming does smart, unshowy work with hemlines functioning as a reliable barometer of age, and the shifts in physicality between characters are so complete that they become imperceptible. Miller herself is among the most compelling to watch – she writes with the instincts of someone who knows exactly where every line lands, and she performs with the same exactitude.
The thread running beneath it all is Billie, played by Jazz Jenkins, who haunts the bathroom as the night moves around her. Jenkins’s early restraint reads initially as understatement, but by the final movement Billie’s isolation has become uncomfortable to sit with. The writing declines to rush toward clarity, and the play’s treatment of sexual violence as structural condition rather than dramatic catalyst is one of its most serious and admirable choices. We are not invited to spectate on trauma but to notice how thoroughly it can go unwitnessed.
The script is at its sharpest when it traces the hidden connections between the evening’s various groups such as the moments when storylines from different corners of the club converge at the sink, the near-misses between strangers who are all navigating the same night. The slow-motion Euphoria-style sequences, intended to render the particular loneliness of a dissociative high, are well-meant and the impulse behind them is sound as that specific variety of isolation is real and worth staging. But the device has become familiar enough to feel like a reflex rather than a choice, and beside the play’s otherwise sharp naturalism it reads as the one moment where FLUSH is borrowing someone else’s vocabulary.
The cubicles themselves represent a spatial opportunity not entirely seized. Communication between women in adjacent stalls, the overheard and the misheard pressed through a cheap partition, might have furnished something richer than what the staging, which tends to treat the bathroom as a single open room, consistently allows.
The technical design – the music that blares and then drops without warning, the light that contracts into something more tender when the play requires it- supports it well. The set’s cleverest structural gesture is placing the fourth wall where the mirrors would be, positioning the audience where these women would otherwise encounter their own reflections. It is the kind of detail that betrays how this production has considered who is watching and at what cost.
Miller’s debut announces a writer who knows what she wants to say and, more importantly, how to say it.
FLUSH runs until Saturday 6th June at Arcola Theatre, London.