Girls by Theresa Ikoko at the Bristol Old Vic Basement.
When HBO launched Girls in 2012 it pretty much became an instant hit. I attempted to watch the first episode based mainly on wanting to take part in conversations and because it was so patently meant to be aimed at people like myself: urban white twenty-something females with too many degrees and too many neuroses. Yet perhaps exactly for that reason I never made it through even the first episode (and that arguably makes me deeply unqualified to speak on the subject, but I’m going to steamroller on regardless). I didn’t feel the sense of allegiance that many viewers have professed to share with Lena Dunham and Co., as much as a hideous feeling of over-familiarity. Because when Dunham’s ‘aspiring writer’ character declared in the most nobhead fashion possible in episode one that she intends to be the ‘voice of a generation’ (tempered with and intended as a joke, yes, but the conceit remained) it shouldn’t have caused us to keep watching, but to turn off and make sure we conscientiously worked at avoiding ever claiming that the concept of a ‘generation’ existed, let alone could be represented by one person.
‘Voice of a generation’ of course has better sound-bite quality than ‘voice of a sociodemographic’, but the confusing falsehood of the idea of a generation of women or ‘girls’ was foregrounded this past Monday by a reading of Theresa Ikoko’s new work Girls at the Bristol Old Vic. The play, written by a British Nigerian writer, tells the part-real and part-fictional story of three women kidnapped by Boko Haram.
The divide between this story and that broadcast by HBO felt almost surreal in its proportions. Dunham has previously directly confronted criticism relating to a lack of racial diversity in her work, and by highlighting the comparison, I am not attempting to directly criticise specifically her, but rather to question the lazy assumptions of shared experience present in many attempts to discuss what it means to be female in the 2010s. Just placing these two productions, the HBO Girls and Ikoko’s Girls next to one another for a moment serves to demonstrate how hugely diverse the experiences of women globally are from one another (and indeed the same could be said for those of males too).
There are many layers of irony in the choice of ‘Girls’ as the title of Ikoko’s play. First is the comparison with its more famous New York counterpart, second is its link to the famous hashtag ‘BringBackOurGirls’, which even Michelle Obama got on board with yet was ultimately unable to effect change from (an issue the play addresses directly) and third is that these females are not really ‘girls’ at all, but sexualised women taken to be raped, married, impregnated.
Largely stripped of the accoutrements of a finished production, watching this work as a script-reading foregrounds the beauty of Ikoko’s work as a piece of writing. So often I see things in the theatre where the skill is in the costume or the setting or the use of music, but in a stripped back performance like this the simplicity of a well-written and well-read script conceived in a fairly classical manner becomes far more effecting than anything coated in five layers of glossy theatrical varnish.
There are times at which this Girls does share similarities with its American sister, particularly in relation to female friendship and the funny opening conversation about vaginas and bottle openers – a very Dunhamesque combination of topics. But then it changes its focus to the lived reality of the kidnapped women’s lives and the politics surrounding it. Ikoko’s directness in addressing issues is made more stirring by the lack of aggression in the delivery. This is not a show that screams its politics at you because it does not have to. The mere facts said aloud are enough.
In a world then, where the idea of a speaking for a ‘generation’ of women with shared experiences is a fallacy even within the context of one country, such as the United States, and more so within a global context, where do we go from here? Perhaps to giving up on the notion of one person speaking for so many at all and exchanging it for listening instead. Girls was performed as part of the Missing Pieces monthly programme at the Bristol Old Vic that stages African, Caribbean and Black British work. This is exactly the kind of theatrical events that we need more of, and not just on one night in one tiny basement room on one day of the month. Because Missing Pieces provides exactly the type of opportunity for more people to be talking and therefore more people to be listening that we need. Women – and men – are not one homogenous group. No one speaks for a generation. Staging more voices is how we begin to hear those who are not being spoken for at all.
Missing Pieces was on at the Bristol Old Vic. Click here for more of their programme.
