Girls review: friendship and survival amid Boko Haram violence

Theresa Ikoko’s Girls won the Alfred Fagon award in 2015 and was joint winner of the George Devine award in 2016, according to the review. The review reports that around 90 Chibok girls are still believed to be missing.

That figure gives the play immediate historical weight. Director Ewa Dina makes the connection explicit in her programme note, which refers to “the Chibok Girls,” while the story follows three Nigerian friends and schoolgirls living in hiding in a forest in 2015.

Their captors remain unnamed, but the review identifies them as members of Boko Haram through details in the play’s backstory.

The review presents Girls as a reminder of the Chibok girls’ fate and of violence against women at its most extreme. It also frames the work as a portrait of female friendship that remains fierce and loyal to the last.

The play makes mass abduction personal through three schoolgirls’ survival.

What does the forest camp reveal?

At first, Girls resembles a post-apocalyptic thriller. Three girls huddle together and play childish games to allay their fear. Flashes of light and sounds punctuate sudden blackouts. Television screens line the rear wall, tuning radio frequencies in and out. A strange structure looms overhead.

Viewers receive the girls’ identities, their forest location, and the source of their danger only in fragments, allowing fear and uncertainty to accumulate before the play explains its historical frame.

Captivity includes forced conversion to Islam and rumors that the girls may be sent out as suicide bombers or fighters. They also describe destroyed homes, a woman trampled to death, the smell of burning human flesh, and corpses in a nearby well. The girls say they no longer feel like children.

They tell each other childhood stories about a mythic forest god, yet feel that deity’s absence in what the review calls their damned corner of the forest.

The play turns an unresolved public history into three schoolgirls’ immediate daily fear.

How do the girls respond to captivity?

Theresa Ikoko individuates all three characters, giving each a distinct response to the camp’s violence and coercion.

• Haleema, played by Tara Tijani, is belligerent and plans to escape.
• Ruhab, played by Sewa Zamba, submits to her new reality and finds a version of love among her captors.
• Tisana, played by Hannah Akhalu, is flogged daily for refusing to attend Islamic prayers and finds escape in fantasy.

Across these sharply different strategies, the play keeps each girl active rather than allowing the three to function as interchangeable symbols of victimhood within the camp.

Even under coercion, the friends laugh, play make-believe, talk about sex and fight, much like any group of female friends.

The review describes their bond as tender, mean and spiky. It calls the trio fierce and loyal to the last. The comparison is with Ava Pickett’s group in the Tudor-era drama 1536.

The girls survive differently, and their differences sharpen their bond.

How effective is the staging?

The staging draws specific objections. The review criticizes too many breakouts, marked by claps of stagecraft thunder and lighting. Short scene changes sometimes create confusion. The final use of screens showing faces, presumably those of real-life missing girls, arrives abruptly and remains unexplained.

These technical reservations do not overturn the review’s central judgment that the play is forceful, because its emotional force comes chiefly from the girls’ distinct responses to captivity.

The review calls the play “without doubt a gut-punch: imaginative, tender, shocking.”

The characters carry the production even when the stage effects become noisy.

Why does the final image matter?

The closing screens give the story a documentary edge. The review assumes the faces belong to real-life missing girls, but its abruptness leaves their presence unexplained. That uncertainty points back to the around 90 Chibok girls whom the review says remain missing, rather than resolving the play’s historical frame.

With around 90 still believed missing, the closing images leave the question of return unresolved and keep the play’s private ordeal tied to a continuing public loss.