Review: Firebird, Southwark Playhouse ★★★★

Review: Firebird at Southwark Playhouse Borough, a decade on from Rochdale, still asking why we blame the girl who won’t behave like a victim

Tia has been in care since she was three. That single fact does more to explain what follows than anything else in Phil Davies‘s play, revived at Southwark Playhouse Borough in a new production by Marlie Haco for Double Telling. Children with parents fussing over bedtimes, homework and what they had for tea are, on the whole, much harder for groomers to reach. Tia has none of that. She is unloved and unanchored, which makes her exactly the kind of target predators go looking for.

Davies wrote the play ten years ago, prompted by the exploitation scandal in his home town of Rochdale. For this revival the setting has shifted to Glasgow, a change that is clearly not decorative. The point, made explicitly in the programme by Davies himself, is that this was never only a Rochdale story. Grooming does not respect a postcode, and the play’s return arrives alongside the Casey Report and Scotland’s own newly announced statutory inquiry, so the shift in location lands as current rather than borrowed.

Mollie Milne plays Tia as prickly, hard to like, sassy and rude, which is exactly right. It would be easy, and dishonest, to make her instantly sympathetic. Instead Milne gives us a girl whose defensiveness is the very thing that puts adults off helping her, which is the whole tragedy of the piece in miniature.

Taqi Nazeer‘s AJ works by easy charm. His questions are practised: who is worried about you, what time is your bedtime. When the answers are nobody and there isn’t one, you can watch him do the sums. Once Tia is drawn into his orbit, the manipulation that follows is uncomfortable to watch precisely because it rings so true.

Kelise Gordon-Harrison doubles as Katie and, in the play’s only glimpse of her, the social worker Deborah, present alongside Tia when she is finally interviewed by the police. Gordon-Harrison gives Deborah a kind of half-presence that says more than a longer scene of overt neglect could: other cases waiting, somewhere else to be, the clock visibly ticking. Tia, prickly as ever and in no mood to make herself easy to help, is not exactly angling for her attention either. She is rude, unhelpful, hard to warm to in that interview, and by then the men involved have already got their version in first.

The staging serves the story well. A raised, exposed platform keeps the actors circling rather than settling, so sightlines never really suffer, though the lack of anywhere to hide does mean some of the transitions between scenes run a little long. That same platform does quiet work of its own too: with no rail and nowhere to retreat to, there is a real sense that Tia could fall from it at any moment, a literal danger that sits neatly alongside the metaphorical one running through everything else. A wheelchair, used sparingly, does a great deal of work in showing plainly what has been done to Tia’s body. There is heavy use of strobe at the transition points, which will not suit everyone, so it is worth knowing that in advance.

The twist near the end is sharp and entirely plausible, the kind of horrible you can see coming and still aren’t ready for. If there’s a criticism, it’s that the very final beat tips into being a touch over-optimistic, a softer landing than the ninety minutes before it have earned.

What I most want to take away from this evening, though, isn’t a verdict on the staging. It’s the reminder that the young people most in need of help are often the ones who make it hardest to give. They push back, they lie, they’re rude to the people trying to reach them. None of that should change what they’re owed. A duty of care doesn’t get to switch itself off just because the person on the other end of it isn’t easy to like.

Practicalities:

Firebird runs at Southwark Playhouse Borough (The Little) until 7 August, ninety minutes with no interval and a strict no-latecomers policy.
Standard tickets are £28 and concessions £22.50.
The show carries a strong content warning, including flashing lights and strobe, and is recommended for ages 16 and up.

Still to come:

28 July: Post-show Q&A with director Marlie Haco and cast members Mollie Milne, Taqi Nazeer and Kelise Gordon-Harrison, free with a ticket to that evening’s performance.

[Thank you to Double Telling who provided a gifted ticket in exchange for an honest review.]

Photography by Toby Mather and Ben Jacobs

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