Well acted and thoughtfully staged, though a little heavy-handed with its sincerity
Four women, one birthday, three decades. Evelyn (Jess Dix) is turning something across childhood, adolescence and adulthood with every version of the party played out in the same space with the same four friends. Bonnie (Amelie Manning), now an adult, pieces the story together from Evelyn’s childhood diary, the group’s original writer – this handover makes the two of them the play’s mirrored pair with one narrating and one narrated. Gen (Georgia Maguire) and Rose (Anna Cleden) are the louder half; Gen is stubborn and scattered and Rose is always mid-poem and mid-dance. This play questions grief: where you put the love for someone once there’s nowhere left for it to go, and the desire to return to a perfect past.
The programme calls the piece an homage to women – there is real pleasure in simply watching four girls be girls together, bickering, teasing and holding each other up. It is these smaller, unguarded moments, rather than the bigger emotional beats, where the friendship feels most real.
Set designer Alex Courtney built a stage split into eras without needing to change it: a shelf stacked with board games on the left, a pair of small wellies sitting untouched beside it as a fairly on-the-nose nod to childhood, a big wooden table centre stage that gets celebrated on, danced on and hidden under in turn and a kitchen on the right with a fridge plastered in photos of the four of them as children and letter magnets spelling words out across the scenes.
The costumes allow us to decipher the before from the after. Rose’s black top and flowing white skirt as a child becomes a tighter, more grown silhouette in a silk straight skirt and halterneck top as an adult. Gen’s brown overalls and white shirt age into brown trousers with the same shirt. Evelyn stays in her pink and brown throughout, and Bonnie, dipping in and out of the past as the constant adult narrator, is dressed the least conspicuously of the four mostly in yellow. The girls are barefoot as children and wear flat ballerinas as women.
Rose and Gen carry much of the production. Rose recited a few poems throughout the production for her friends, and the audience. Both Georgia Maguire and Anna Cleden bring an energy that sustains whole stretches of the play. Cleden in particular feels like the heart of the show, drifting between reciting poetry and breaking into dance whenever the moment allows her to. Amelie Manning’s Bonnie is rightly more restrained, a woman observing her own past rather than living inside it, which explains why she reads as the least performative of the four.
There were a few dance sequences, full songs handed over to Rose and Evelyn moving through the space to Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ “Sherry.” Well performed, and the audience around were clearly won over, but the effect leaned closer to feel-good cinema. Elsewhere the production makes stronger use of the space, at one point seating the four of them along the steps between the audience for one of Rose’s poems, closing the distance between the girls’ world and the audience.
To its credit, the sixty minutes pass without a dull stretch. The acting is strong and the design is thoughtful, though the play is a little too pleased with its own sincerity at times. The Girls I Look Up To is worth seeing, but the earnestness may not suit every audience.
The Girls I Look Up To runs at Riverside Studios, London until Sunday 16th August.