ajhlovestheatre

£1 THURSDAYS

by Kat Rose-Martin

directed by Vicky Moran

Finborough Theatre, London – until 22 December 2023

https://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/production/1-thursdays/

Here’s something fresh, funny and more than a little touching. Kat Rose-Martin’s big-mouthed, big-hearted play explodes like a firecracker, leaving behind it trails of melancholy, hilarity and irresistible human feeling. Rude and blisteringly honest, it’s a no-holds-barred study of female friendship, the uncertainties of being a teenager, and the importance of not necessarily settling for the life you think has been mapped out for you.

The title, £1 Thursdays, refers to the weekly mega-cheap club night that Bradford 17-year-olds Jen (Yasmin Taheri) and Stacey (Monique Ashe-Palmer) regularly go to at their local, to get puke-drunk on shots, dance the night away and compete with each other as to how many snogs they can rack up. The year is 2012 (Vicky Moran’s vital, supple staging is punctuated by ear-splitting blasts of dancefloor fillers from a decade ago) and these young women are the products of a city on its uppers where everybody’s just getting by, living for the weekend (or, in Jen and Stacey’s case, for Thursdays).

Rose-Martin’s dialogue – salty, unadorned but witty – has the unmistakable, unsentimental ring of authenticity. If sometimes the characters offer up their innermost feelings a little too quickly, it’s never less than engaging. It makes for the same compulsive viewing as a soap opera, although a teatime TV show would probably never have this much swearing in it.

It’s played at a hell of a lick, sometimes a little too fast for clarity, but both the writing and the delivery capture the urgency of youth: the intensity, the disaffection, the feeling of wanting everything right now. Most essentially, it conveys the camaraderie and the love between these two women. Ashe-Palmer and Taheri are wonderful, so natural it feels they’ve really been friends for years, besties who scrap like she-wolves but inherently have each others back. That set-up, so convincingly done, is important as it makes it all the more powerful when circumstances and expectations rend the friendship asunder, as life has a way of doing.

At times reminiscent of other coming-of-age plays – there are shades of Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue And Bob Too, Willy Russell’s Educating Rita and Stags And Hens, even Jonathan Harvey’s Beautiful Thing here – £1 Thursdays repeatedly confounds expectations in the most pleasing ways. Jen’s relationship with her mother (Sian Breckin, wonderfully warm and eccentric) is, for all the former’s wayward behaviour, so loving and respectful, and suffused with so much affection. Ashe-Palmer, equal parts sunshine and steel, brilliantly conveys the contradictions in Stacey, a gifted dancer with an underlying neediness and self-sabotaging lack of confidence despite all her outward bravado, who makes a disastrous relationship choice.

Similarly, Taheri’s Jen is so much more than a hard-scrabble, sexually advanced-beyond-her years kid with a big attitude; she’s a prodigious mathematician, easily tossing out answers to complex sums that would make other students’ eyes glaze over. There’s a beautiful scene where she has a university interview and gets a tantalising glimpse of what her life could be, and it’s genuinely moving, so honest and organic is Taheri’s performance…this is acting of the highest order. Joseph Ayre impressively differentiates between the wildly differing roles of Stacey’s potentially abusive boyfriend and the kind, if vaguely patronising, uni interviewer who startles Jen into some seismic life changes.

Moran’s staging is full of inventive touches, from direct audience engagement, to sections of slo-mo choreography that suggest the temporary anaesthesia of intoxication only to be brought up sharp and short by the sudden, stark intrusion of brutal “real” life as the girls roll out of the clubs into the streets, or the STI clinic. Lighting designer Rajiv Pattani bathes it all in the dingy, queasy hues of nightlife, and Ethan Cheek’s set of the sort of retractable queue dividers found outside almost every entertainment venue in the land and semi-opaque curtains, is ingenious.

Ultimately, this is Ashe-Palmer and Taheri’s show, and they make irresistible, surprisingly sympathetic central figures that you find yourself really rooting for. They have a confrontation scene, terrifically well written, that is as electrifying as it is painful to watch. As actresses, they are the kind of talents that people write things for.

This is a delight.