School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play
Jocelyn Bioh
(Lyric Hammersmith, 18 June–15 July 2023)
Review by Karla Williams
It’s not often I watch a play and am transported back to my girlhood. School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play is set in the mid-1980s in a Ghanaian boarding school. I attended a London high school in the mid-90s. But while the location and decade may be different, the experiences are remarkably similar. 40-year-old Karla is suddenly reconnected with my 16-year-old self, and I’m vividly reminded of her thoughts, feelings and ideas about the world.
Queen Bee Paulina is the star of Aburi Girls Boarding School, and it is predicted she’ll be chosen when the Miss Ghana pageant recruiter comes to visit. She’s surrounded by friends who’ll do whatever she tells them, and who only share their true feelings when she’s well out of earshot. Until US student Erica transfers to the school. Lighter skinned with long, straight hair, she turns Paulina’s world upside down. Paulina’s friends suddenly find the courage to push back, no longer committed to keeping her secrets. With Erica’s beauty being more ‘universally appealing’, Paulina’s selection for the pageant is no longer a sure thing.
Jocelyn Bioh’s award-winning play opens with a familiar scene of girls talking about boyfriends, dieting and beauty. Such familiar topics told through a Ghanian lens highlight both the differences and similarities in teenage girls’ experiences across the world. But it’s the humour Bioh brings to the group dynamic which makes the scene, and the play as a whole, utterly hilarious.
The play assembles a collection of joyously crafted characters, each adding their own comic value. Alongside the popular girl Paulina (Tara Tijani) are academic Ama (Heather Agyepong), ‘tell it like it is’ cousins Gifty and Mercy (Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and Bola Akeju), and kind but low confidence Nana (Jadesola Odunjo). None of the characters are superfluous and each actor delivers performances that are funny from the very beginning until the end. Gifty and Mercy, who continually bounce off each other to create a scene-stealing double act, give standout performances.
But what I love most about the play is that Bioh uses humour to explore deeper themes of colourism, bleaching creams, and dark-skinned beauty. The arrival of Erica (Anna Shaffer) poses a threat because she’s mixed race, a form of beauty that dark-skinned Paulina just cannot compete with. In a scene where the girls finally confront each other, Paulina reveals that Erica’s light skin makes her ‘better’, a belief I know all too well. As the darkest daughter in a family of four girls, I had a similar conversation with a mixed-race friend. Yet Bioh brings light and shade (pardon the pun) to all her characters, with Erica explaining how being a mixed-race girl in an all-white neighbourhood has created hardship for her, too.
School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play achieves the holy trinity of any excellent story: it makes you think, laugh and feel, all at the same time. Set in 1986, the hope is that ideas of beauty have evolved and that, in the age of women like Michaela Coel and Lashana Lynch, all shades are finally being celebrated. With skin bleaching creams still big business around the world, we clearly still have a long way to go.
https://lyric.co.uk/shows/school-girls-or-the-african-mean-girls-play