Old Fitz Unequivocally, beyond torture, death, or destruction, the most deplorable human experience has, and always will be female puberty. That god-awful period of thirteen to eighteen, where all of a sudden you’re at a very special age where you want things and have feelings that you’ve never felt before. And yet, it is not puberty itself that is the true evil of the Female Puberty ExperienceTM, it is the fact that we, as a culture, tend to throw our hands up to the sky and decide we don’t want to deal with it. In layman’s terms, we hate thinking about the fact that young girls get horny. Socially, we all expect it from young men. Teenage boy libido is built into our culture, into our media, into the way we interact with them on a day to day basis. However, in our refusal to think of our girls as anything else but little angels, we manufacture a blind spot for ourselves. Because we don’t give them an outlet for these new-found feelings, or even acknowledge they exist at all, they grasp behind our backs for what they can get, which tends to, ironically, put them in more danger than they would’ve been if we’d just let them explore in the first place. Truly, as Needy tells us in Jennifer’s Body, hell is a teenage girl.

Such is the thesis of She Threaded Dangerously at the Old Fitz theatre. A discomforting but culturally vital demand of us to acknowledge that if we don’t foster healthy desire, it will simply grow in other, more rotten places. Upon entering the theatre, the four young women, Mel (played by director Claudia Elbourne), Sophie (Larissa Turton), Luna (Karrine Kanaan) and Natalie (Alyssa Peters) are already sitting in the space. As we make our way to our seats, our presence immediately feels like an invasion. The Old Fitz’s tiny black box means that we almost have to step around them to make our way to where we need to go, and chips away at the standard separation between artist and audience. The stage is stripped back, three benches and a tree in the background, and relies on the narrative to do much of the imagining for it, although it successfully provided a backdrop for much of the piece. The four girls are dressed exactly the same, regulation uniforms that are both militarily sexless and eerily sexualised, as we see later in a skirt inspection scene and the only too familiar experience of the see-through white blouse. I was immediately drawn in by the performers. Even in the dark of the pre-show chaos, each character was decisively physically characterised, and in moments of reshuffling and adjustments, all the girls acknowledged the movement, checking in on one another. In this way, it felt less like a tableau and more like we were in a classroom with them, waiting for the bell to ring.

The piece began with an explosion of movement, which succeeded to create pacing and tension that carried throughout the rest of the piece. Although I must admit I am not personally a fan of the one-word-at-a-time storytelling that seems to be fairly popular in the independent theatre scene at the moment, it was an immediate focus point for the piece and created much of the early humour. Although, as I often find with this particular ensemble trope, when longer, fuller, more characterized lines are traded out for fast-paced rhythm, the slower scenes tend to suffer for it - and indeed, many of the earlier monologues struggled to find the settled emotional nuance needed for them to thrive. As the piece evolved, so did the performers, and slowing down provided all four enough time to comfortably settle into a much more naturalistic acting style. Perhaps the strongest example of this was Larissa Turton’s scenes with the adult cop she develops feelings for. Although perhaps slightly over-performing in their first scene, by her second one-on-one moment, she brimmed with the subtle anxieties and brash faux-overconfidence the character needed, and the two of them continued to impress for the remainder of the show. Karrine Kanaan was another substantial performer - and I was left wishing I had seen more of her throughout the piece. Kanaan provided a bullseye interpretation of the larger-than-life emotional experience of teenage-hood whilst never bleeding past the point of believability. Her monologue admitting that she had seen Sophie and the cop was delivered with beautiful light and shade. Alyssa Peters bloomed during the second half, really finding her stride in an incredibly touching moment between her and Kanaan where they express their most vulnerable anxieties about what’s happening around them. Claudia Elbourne, valiantly taking on the role late after the departure of Lilian Valverde, provides an energetic and watchable depiction of Mel - although lacks the vocal and emotional nuance of the actors around her, simply due to a lack of rehearsal time with the character. She did, however, provide an uncomfortably accurate representation of the too-overt clumsy sexuality of teenage girls. The men of the cast, although having significantly less on-stage time, certainly pulled their weight. Micheal Yore’s depiction of the new-age predator and the weaponisation of the teenage girl desire to feel special and interesting was truly bone-chilling, and Hamish Alexander and Leon Walsh provided strong emotional support to their scenes with the girls.

Past the performances, lighting designer Luna Ng and sound designer Alexander Lee-Rekers provided invaluable support to the climactic moments of the piece, keeping it on its feet and moving at all times. I was particularly drawn to Lee-Reker's use of a buzzing sound in the anxious moments of the play. Elbourne’s direction is incredibly clear stylistically and emotionally, bringing to it a cohesive flair often missing from young directors. The script drives at a fast pace, and although I understood why it thought it needed it, I was left wanting for a more thoughtful use of rhythm throughout the show. Much of the writing was slightly on-the-nose, which made the already difficult task of injecting nuance into the teenage experience even moreso. However, the insidious patriarchy that infests every character and the development of the stakes were done brilliantly. It also created an incredibly accurate portrayal of vengeful teenage cruelty and the manipulation tactics of their adult abusers. It, like the performers, seemed to begin to trust the audience more as the piece continued. I did wish for both Luna’s hinted queer identity and her viewing of Sophie and the cop’s relationship to be teased out further, but as the show continued 20 minutes past its advertised runtime, I understood why it wasn’t.

As a smash-cut of the dangers of the infantilization of teenage girls under patriarchy, She Threaded Dangerously shines, and leaves its audiences either reminiscing on their own pubescent experience, or for the men in the crowd, perhaps more willing to understand one they didn’t have. Its whipcords of tension and humour cross deliciously, and provide a strong thesis to its audience, one that they demand gets listened to. Led by strong performances and a cohesive style, it delivered a powerful emotional experience that will sit with me long after leaving the Old Fitz’s tiny theatre. Patriarchy is a clever animal, and it is up to us as the elders raised in it, to deny its continuation in the next generation, even if that means accepting the ick of teenage horniness.