Girls by Theresa Ikoko. Photo: Nobby Clark
Long after the media circus has moved on, the #bringbackourgirls feed is kept alive by people, devoted family and friends, who are still tracking the Nigerian government’s failure to find the Chibok schoolgirls abducted in broad daylight. It’s been 889 days, and counting, since they were taken. A small number of the original 276 girls have managed to escape – the fate of the rest is uncertain.
Theresa Ikoko’s play pokes fun at clicktivism: “Why is everyone so bloody obsessed with hashtags? Can you use it to shoot your way out of here?”, asks an abducted teenage girl. But it also shows the deeper faultlines it hides. Social media creates a glib picture of an easily accessible world where everything is simple and missing schoolgirls can be traced using Google Earth and a handwave from Michelle Obama.
These three teenagers are betrayed by the social media storm that’s trying to help them: the youngest of them is proud as she preens and preps for videos with her kidnappers, without realising that it’s this oxygen of publicity that makes them a valuable commodity. One of the strongest points of Ikoko’s plays is the way it shows the naive, celebrity-obsessed world of these teenagers, without mocking it: escapism is the only coping strategy they have left. She captures their hilariously surreal roleplays, like Genet’s The Maids with the sadism cut out, and she fills their care for each other with tenderness and warmth. But it’s also limited by their perspective.
There’s nothing for these three girls to do. They’re trapped in a terrifying, invisible system: Ikoko can’t make them interact with their offstage captors, or see a future for them outside its boundaries. The narrative becomes stagnant, and the same dynamics are rehearsed again and again until we reach an ill-advised, artificial-feeling ending.
But watching them is almost enough. Anita-Joy Uwajeh, Yvette Boakye and Abiola Ogunbiyi work so well together, forming and hardening in the pressure cooker of their Islamist captors’ camp. The real thing they all have in common, when they’ve exhausted all their memories of their home village, is girlhood: and even that’s slipping away fast.
Other writers have compared Girls to Danai Gurira’s rave-reviewed Eclipsed, at the Gate Theatre last year. But there’s definitely room for two plays about female friendship in warzones, especially considering how rare it is to see a piece of theatre that’s not set in (or heavily reworked to be in) Britain. Ikoko’s voice feels fresh and sharp, and she lends it to people who aren’t normally heard: either in the ‘white saviour’ narratives of social media campaigning, or in a theatre scene that’s only just starting to look at lived experiences worldwide, as they become closer than ever.