Writer: Charlie Josephine
Director: Rob Watt
A show about the virality of explicit photos and four disparate Year 11 students exploring their attitudes towards sexuality, gender, consent and the failings of high school sex ed classes, aimed at age 14+ and set to tour with accompanying workshops and CPD? One that starts with unashamed beatboxing? Oh gosh, it’s Issues Based Theatre isn’t it…
Birds and Bees started life over lockdown 2020, streamed remotely to over 500 schools across the UK. Following input from these Zoom trapped guinea pigs, amongst other young folk, the show has been reworked for a live audience premiering in Sheffield, hoping to enlighten and enliven even more youths across the next two months of touring.
Part safety education, part social activist call to arms, Birds and Bees tells the story of Leilah (Dumile Sibanda), bogged down by the intricacies of Instagram; Billy (Milo McCarthy), queer, proud and panicking; Aarron (Richard Logun), tightrope walking between man and incel; and Maisy (Sandra Belarbi), who couldn’t care less about any of that sex stuff. When compromising photos of their school’s most popular couple en flagrante leak and go viral, this foursome are empowered to start having some difficult, complex conversations around gender, identity, sexuality, power and consent, and in doing so start to realise their potential to change the world forever.
Lofty claims. But does the show deliver? Well, not really. The four main characters, although fantastically acted and genuinely funny throughout, fall into the same tired stereotypes they are apparently trying to break – the sassy black best friend, the suspiciously wise LGBTQer, the dumb jock and the infantilised geek (the latter of who is even dressed in dungarees and colourful hairclips, just to reinforce her sexual naivety). It seems like maybe that’s the point, but the ‘breakthroughs’ each has about their own failings and lack of honesty with themselves and the world around them are reduced to mere minutes of the hour long run time, often hidden in mumbled raps or unintelligible singing, and then forgotten until the final five minutes of ‘empowering’ moping about how sex education is terribly done and how Britain is failing her young.
Birds and Bees tries to include so many topical problems that it devolves into a series of buzzwords and pontificating, without ever offering solutions or education – for example, the inciting incident is about sexting and sharing private messages, but completely fails to coherently discuss why people are angry about it, what the consequences for the victims are or what could have been done differently. It isn’t entirely clear if this is a show to teach young people about handling the covered topics – in which case they will go away confused – or a show to encourage teachers, parents and politicians to change things up – in which case why is it staged like an after school special? It would have benefitted massively from picking one or two subjects and covering them well, rather than trying to fit everything in. Some of the choices are even actively insulting – asexuality apparently doesn’t exist, as Maisy is just scared of sex; academic achievement can never be celebrated, only mocked; the black kids are just constantly angry; and the non-binary character Billy might as well be female coded since all their scenes are dismissive of masculinity and firmly rooted in the female experience (doubly annoying when both writer and actor identify as non-binary). Like the knot of tangled wires set on stage as a not-so-subtle metaphor, the show seems determined to hide what is actually at the centre of it.
Full disclosure, your reviewer is not a 16 year old, and has not been to High School in many years, so perhaps shows like this hit different when viewed by their intended audience, assuming that is the young people anyway. Perhaps what young folk today need to keep them safe online and to encourage them to open up about their personal truths really is a bunch of proto-rap and interpretive movement performed by overly dramatic grown adults pretending to be their peers. It’s just very easy to remember actually being 16 and rolling our eyes at such things when the schools inevitably booked them to make PSHCE more tolerable for all involved. While it’s wonderful that young people are being encouraged to talk about the very important topics covered by Birds and Bees, anyone who has recently met a teenager knows they are already so much better at it than past generations ever were, so this confusing mess isn’t going to assist furthering that conversation in any helpful way. On the flip side, if the show does help even one Leilah, Aarron, Billy or Maisy then maybe it’s worth sitting through 60 minutes of cheese for any young person in your life who might need a little extra support to know that things are going to be OK.
Runs until Saturday 11 February 2023.
