We Weren’t Innocent; We Were Girls – White Bear Theatre, London

Writer: Eleanor Boes

Director: Freya Griffiths

Murder is always shocking but rarely is it as funny as in this new play from Lucid Blue Stories, a company made up of recent graduates from The Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts. That’s not to say that We Weren’t Innocent; We Were Girls is flippant about the murder of a teenage schoolgirl. Lucid Blue finds the perfect balance between horror and comedy. Cleverly and inventively staged as ‘true crime’, Eleanor Boes’s play is as fascinating as a superior thriller.

It also runs like a whodunnit. We know from the start that Hannah has been killed when a true crime podcaster travels from California to England to interview Hannah’s mother for her popular show. The case is so gripping that the podcaster hopes to run the series for multiple episodes. Dressed in pink athleisure, Sophie Reisner gives a very sharp performance as the scheming podcaster, all sympathy when the tape recorder is off but belligerent with her questions once it’s switched on. She asks Hannah’s mother (a very believable Liv Hodder) to relate the story of her daughter’s murder.

In flashback, we are witness to the last days of Hannah’s life. Could her killer be best friend Flo (Allie Aylott), abandoned by her mother and almost left to fend for herself? She is desperate to be loved. Or is it other best friend Daisy (Lucy-Lou Gallivan) who is terrorised by her elder brother Dylan? Or possibly creepy Dylan himself, who’s already given up on life, his nihilism a dark attraction for Flo?

But before the tragedy of the second act, we see how happy the three girls are in a wonderful and warm scene in which Hannah (Hannah Dootson) and Flo pierce Daisy’s ear with a sewing needle. They pin her to the floor, but it’s only later we realise that the position the three girls are in is a foreshadowing of the murder to come.

Another game the girls play is screaming their guts into pillows and this is mirrored in a later scene when Hannah’s mother silences her own scream while listening to the finished podcast, her identity now a character in the adaptation of the truth. Surprisingly, Dylan (Declan Adamson) sits by her, no longer the ogre we thought he was.

Buoyed by excellent performance all around, the story rips along and scene changes, under Freya Griffiths’s tight direction, see the cast hinting through movement what is still to come. Not a second is wasted and even when some mishaps occur with the props in the first few minutes, the cast deals with them in such a hilarious manner, especially Reisner who writes the mishap on the newspapers that line the set, that you can’t help but wonder if these mishaps have been scripted in some way. It seems incredible that all these creatives are only at the start of their careers.

Boes’s play never feels exploitative either. Her characters feel real and fully formed, from Hannah’s mother’s relaxed attitude to her daughter’s partying to the girls when petty jealousies in friendships overwhelm teenagers with less experience of life. And so, while We Weren’t Innocent; We Were Girls is delightfully wicked it is also very sad.

Runs until 20 July 2024