Brat on the dancefloor, Fleabag in the cubicle
The girls’ bathroom has had something of a moment in the theatre lately, and it’s not hard to see why. Millennials are hitting their late twenties with enough distance to find the chaos funny and enough proximity to still feel it while older Gen Zs are catching up fast, old enough now to be doing proper nights out, the kind that end in a McDonald’s or a cry in a cubicle. Most London women know the bathroom break as its own event – the debrief, the decompression, the place where the night’s actual business gets conducted. Playwrights have lived and noticed it. Drunk Girls Cry Here is the latest to set up inside those four walls.
The audience is seated while the party is already mid-swing. All six cast members are on stage in funky sunglasses, doing shots, requesting songs from the sound and lighting operator who occupies a DJ booth in the corner with the easy authority of someone who controls the whole night. The soundtrack is precisely right, Charli XCX’s brat sitting alongside ABBA and Britney with the logic of every millennial night out you’ve ever had. It’s a smart piece of staging – the kind that makes you feel the night has already decided to have a good time, with or without you, and you’re about to walk in the middle of something chaotic
Written by Eva Regan and directed by Blair McAlpine, the play follows three women – Saph (Emily Puttick), Flick (Regan herself) and Liv (Áine O’Neill Mason) as they celebrate Saph’s twenty-eighth birthday. It’s a transitional age, and the play knows it. Twenty-eight sits at that particular junction where the night out still feels necessary but the morning after costs more than it used to. When the girls eventually break for the bathroom, the shift is immediate – a toilet sits centre stage and the sink opposite is covered in graffiti. By the end of the night, the floor will be layered in loo roll and the quiet accumulation of a big evening. It’s unglamorous and entirely accurate.
The lighting does smart work shifting between the strobe and churn of the dancefloor and something closer and more tender when the bathroom becomes a confessional. The pacing benefits from this constant movement between the two – the dancing sequences offer genuine relief before the next round of honesty. Consent, pregnancy scares, drug use, the particular difficulty of navigating your late twenties with your friendships intact – Regan fits a lot into one evening without any of it feeling crowded.
Regan’s Flick is the kind of character who commands a room without appearing to try – loud, chaotic, funny and possessed of the particular energy of someone who cannot afford to let it drop. As both writer and performer, Regan understands Flick from the inside out, there is something unmistakably Fleabag about her. The scene between Flick and Archie, Saph’s boyfriend, played with an unsettling kind of reasonableness by Jacob Hutchings, is the production’s centrepiece and one of the sharpest pieces of writing in the play, and both actors meet it fully.
The three men, Jordan Peedell, Jacob Hutchings and Kieran Robson, function largely as satellites to the women’s orbits, which is accurate to both the play’s title and to most nights out. Their interactions carry the evening’s comic relief and shed light on where each of the women finds herself by the end of the night. Despite their limited stage time, the boys are never just furniture and the laughs they draw feel earned rather than inserted. Regan has a gift for comic timing on the page and the full cast match her for it in performance.
What distinguishes Drunk Girls Cry Here is how unapologetically unpolished it is. This is not a criticism – the messiness is the point. These women are already half-cut when we meet them, and the actors commit to that throughout, sustaining the particular quality of drunk conversation, where emotion sits too close to the surface and honesty bubbles up before you’ve quite decided to be honest. That is difficult to act, and they play it well.
Regan’s script handles a remarkable amount of thematic territory for a single night in a single room. What it understands, and what lesser work in this vein gets wrong, is that this isn’t a play about problems in need of resolution. It’s a play about the specific texture of being twenty-eight, at the edge of something, in a bathroom with your friends. That’s more than enough.
Drunk Girls Cry Here runs until Saturday 16th May at The Hope Theatre, London.