£1 Thursdays by Ket Rose-Martin, the Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Road, London SW18 to 23 December 2023.

4****: William Russell.

“Perceptive, funny play about two young girls growing up in Bradford and facing up to what lies in store. A real pre-Christmas treat.”

The play opens outside the Club Ocean, the Thursday night escape for two seventeen year old Bradford girls from the lives they live and the life to come unless they do something about it. Jen is smart, clever enough to go to university if she gets the chance, but will she? Has she the nerve to seize the opportunity. Stacey, her best friend, would like to be a dancer but again who from her background did that? The action is set about ten years ago. They are pretty foul mouthed, wear fairly outrageous clothes to go clubbing and when caught short outside are not averse to finding a quiet spot and relieving themselves. But they are not slappers. Just working class girls with in Jen’s case a no nonsense mum who knows how to look after herself. As the play progresses we get to know them both as the retreat to the club loo to fix themselves up, discuss how to enhance a bosom with chicken breasts, the men they dance with, tell those waiting to get in where to go, and we discover how Stacey gets on when she has to go to the clinic for tests and how Jen fares with Tristan, the sympathetic adviser who provides the chance for her to go to university if she takes it, how Stacey fares with her boyfriend Nathan, how mum deals with him when he becomes a problem, how they fall out and make up. The scenes are broken up with songs of the time. Maybe the Bradford accents get a little tricky at times to follow, but the performances are all so good that it hardly matters. Yasmin Taheri as Jen and Monique Ashe-Palmer as Stacey are perfectly matched and the more you get to know of them the more you hope that somehow both of them will escape to somewhere better, and that the friendship, threatened by the different futures they could have will survivr. Sian Breckin delivers a fine double turn as the tough mother and the equally tough nurse at the clinic as does Joseph Ayre as the two very different men in their lives. Director Vicky Moran has created their world out of very little – the set is a collection of those posts with tapes used to guide people in queues and a curtain which creates the loo behind which the girls discuss the events of the night – and found endless ways of exploiting the Finborough space. It is the play’s world premiere – there has to be a world out there waiting to see it performed. It is that good an evening, a pre Christmas treat in this instance but a treat any time as a good play should be.

Cast

Yasmin Taheri – Jen.

Monique Ashe-Pamer – Stacey.

Sian Breckin – Leanne.

Sian Breckin – Nurse.

Joseph Ayre – Nathan.

Joseph Ayre – Tristan.

Creatives

Director – Vicky Moran.

Set & Costume Design – Ethan Church.

Lighting Designer – Rajiv Pattani.

Sound Designer – Roly Botha.

Movement Director – Nadia Sohawon.

Intimacy Director – Raniah Al-Sayed.

Fight Director – Sam Behan.