Prompt Productions, a female-led company, brings its debut play Loos Loos to Edinburgh Fringe this year, providing audiences with a thought-provoking and original piece of theatre directed by Maya Calcraft and written by co-writers Ella Thornburn and Grace Boag-Matthews. We meet Lou (Bella Ofo) and Freya (Isobel McNerney), two close friends—aka ‘the Cistern Sisters’—in secondary school, whose relationship develops over the course of their GCSE year. The play takes place, as the name suggests, in the geography loos at their school, providing a secluded, yet never wholly private, location for the girls to discuss all aspects of their lives; they chat about annoying teachers, diets, periods, pilates butt workouts. But amidst all this, and in sharp contrast to it, we’re introduced to the subject of the sexual assault which Lou experiences while at a classmate’s party. Suddenly, a seemingly unbreakable friendship is thrown into uncertainty, as Freya attempts to help her friend, though never fully able to provide the comfort she needs, and Lou struggles to process what happened to her.
Image credits: Geraint Lewis
The venue and set design play a crucial part in creating an intimate, yet claustrophobic, environment. Clover Studio at Riddles Court is a very small, dark room with limited audience capacity. The size of the stage is not to the detriment of the play, though, as it is essentially the size of a small bathroom. Indeed, a larger stage would likely have taken away from the realism. A singular wall covered in graffiti divides the cubicle from the rest of the bathroom; the graffiti immortalises the numerous people that have spent time in these seemingly insignificant loos, including Lou and Freya, who leave their mark there at the end of the play. The audience essentially becomes the bathroom mirror, into which the girls look while checking their uniforms and fixing their makeup.
The environment in which the audience finds themselves, and their proximity to the actors, contributes to the feeling of claustrophobia, capturing the suffocating situation Lou finds herself in. It is in Lou’s solitary reflection, in the form of poetic monologues, that this feeling is most overwhelming. The lights change, and Lou stands alone in the cubicle, breathless, as she tries to detangle the events at her classmate’s party and understand what exactly happened to her—the cubicle comes to serve as a confession booth, with the most personal and vulnerable moments unfolding inside this space.
Image credits: Geraint Lewis
During these monologues Ofo demonstrates her skill as an actor, switching between the light-hearted banter with her best friend and her unavoidable feelings of uncertainty and fear; the climax of the narrative is when the two dynamics converge, and the severity of the situation is revealed to Freya. While McNerney often provides levity when the play delves into darker moments, watching Freya try to process this new information and comfort Lou as best she can is deeply moving. Loos Loos was written by Thornburn and Boag-Matthews while they were completing their A-levels; as a result, the dialogue throughout feels genuine, and the play, though not a comedy, is at points very humorous.
An aspect of the dialogue that I couldn’t fully understand was the way the girls discuss their female teacher, Painsworth, who is given responsibility for dealing with Lou’s sexual assault. They comment dismissively about Painsworth being a feminist, yet the girls themselves are forced to experience misogyny from both their classmates and the broader school system. I think I was expecting their opinion on feminism to more clearly change as the show goes on, given its importance in the situation in which they find themselves. Nevertheless, the play does effectively highlight the issue of the ongoing failings of educational institutions in taking sexual assault cases seriously, which was interesting to see represented on stage.
Image credits: Geraint Lewis
The effectiveness of Loos Loos lies in its familiarity. Chatting with your friends in the school toilets is a pretty universal experience; beyond this, though, there’s the unsettling familiarity of the situation Lou is going through, and how both her friend and her school approaches it. Though only fifty minutes long, the play is an intimate and well-structured piece that elegantly deals with heavy subject matter.
If you find yourself in Edinburgh this August, Loos Loos is well worth a watch, offering original, compelling writing, and commendable performances from Ofo and McNerney.
4/5
Loos Loos is showing at Greenside at Riddle’s Court Clover Studio from Fri 1st – Sun 17th August. Get your tickets here!
Featured image credit: Geraint Lewis
