Writer: Miriam Battye
Director: Jaz Woodcock-Stewart
Highly anticipated, Miriam Battye’s new play is slightly disappointing. Its examination of the lives of teenagers, who are both desperate and simultaneously afraid to lose their virginity, is often very funny and even moving in places, but their stories are stubbornly static, and the narrative struggles to move forward.
Battye’s previous play, Strategic Love Play, looked at the trials of a first date where the female character wants a relationship without the preliminary flirting and dating, while Battye’s earlier work, Scenes with girls, interrogated the value of marriage over female friendship. The Virgins, with its teenage characters obsessed with sex, is more like Scenes with girls, albeit set earlier in womanhood.
Phoebe and Jess have come to Chloe’s house to get ready for a night ‘out-out’. Presumably, as they all are 16 (though their ages are never mentioned in the play itself), Chloe’s parents are ‘out-out’, too. The girls congregate in the bathroom, while across the stage, Chloe’s brother, Joel, plays video games with a new friend whom he has met in the gym. Intrigued by the reticent stranger, the girls take turns to go and view the older boy slumped in front of his game console.
The girls are hopelessly inexperienced, and the fear that they will end up with the wrong kind of boy at the club they intend to go to makes them even more hopeless. They try out hand signals, which could be used to alert the others if they are in trouble. “What if it just looks like I’m just dancing though,” Jess remarks, while Phoebe worries that deaf clubbers might think they are attempting conversation in sign language. Their ingenuousness is all very funny, but it also reveals the measures that young women have to take in order to feel safe.
But when older, more experienced and definitely not-a-virgin Anya arrives at the bathroom, the girls become even more confused. Anya, with the jaded views of a 17-year-old, tells them that having sex the first time isn’t such a big deal. It’s like…and she puts her finger in her cheek to make a popping sound. “Like a non-thing,” she dryly states.
Across the stage, meanwhile, Joel is being taught how to pull girls by his new gym buddy, Mel. Don’t say anything, don’t even look at them, Joel is instructed. Later, Mel wistfully remembers the times when sex and love were less complicated, when the rules of attraction were simpler. Strangely, he comes across as the only romantic in the house.
The Virgins is only 90 minutes long, but it drags in the second half when the same material is discussed. Director Jaz Woodcock-Stewart inserts lots of grand music and total blackouts to keep up the pace, and she ekes out every inch of humour in Battye’s script; sometimes too much, with the result that the important messages within the play appear as trivial as Anya supposes they are.
The performances from the six-strong cast are all top-notch, with Molly Hewitt-Richards as Phoebe displaying a fine skill in comedy, and Alec Boaden is nicely understated as Mel, the older boy who is just as clueless as the rest. Anushka Chakravarti is full of childish contradictions as Chole, and Ragevan Vasan is delightfully shy as her brother Joel. Some common sense comes from Ella Bruccoleri’s Jess, while Zoë Armer is the deceptively green Anya who is fond of exclaiming “twist’ each time she sees a plot twist coming.
On the living room wall (set by Rosie Elnile) is a painting of lilies in the Georgia O’Keeffe style, their stamens brightly sensuous orange with pollen. The image underlines how much is at stake for these young people, no matter the chaos that ensues.
Runs until 7 March 2026
