“Although the play is essentially a comedy, its core is far from funny. The stakes here aren’t just intensely personal.
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“...Ghanaian American writer Jocelyn Bioh...created a funny but biting play packed with clever laughs that come with a stinging afterburn...It’s heartbreaking, as we watch this beautiful Black woman tear strips off her own skin in a quest to fit a western standard of beauty she cannot hope to meet.”
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"“This play shows Black women that there is nothing but misery to be found in chasing them – and that there is beauty to be found outside of that: you just need to acknowledge it.”
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“This is an exuberant production that manages to be incredibly fun whilst also highlighting important questions around colourism, racial identity and Eurocentric beauty ideals in a way that isn’t heavy-handed. This show is a tonic, and a joy injection that encourages us to embrace difference – a message, I reckon, we all need to hear right now.”
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The structure is somewhat formulaic, but the 80-minute show leaves us wanting more. In amongst the belly-laughs, serious themes of poverty, racism, and white supremacy unfurl. School Girls is a social comedy-commentary that could easily transfer to the West End or even be the next hit Netflix show
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“Monique Touko’s sparky production deftly skirts sitcom to highlight the applicability of a darker narrative that may be set at a desirable girls’ boarding school in Ghana in 1986 but speaks more widely to the ongoing, ever-desperate desire to fit in, often at considerable cost to one’s sense of self.”
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“ ‘School Girls’ is bursting with sharply funny lines and precision-engineered setpieces...But there’s a bleakness to it, too, as it shows the pain of these girls and woman as they sacrifice themselves for a Western narrative of beauty that they know, deep down, will never embrace them.”
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“This is emphatically not a play to sit and endure in silence, but to joyfully engage with...it’s a really smashing 80 minutes in the theatre, and a sparkling new addition to the roster of London’s summer must-sees.”
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