BWW Reviews: SCARLET, Southwark Playhouse, April 17 2015

It's a curious thing. So few plays show us characters who live lives the way they are lived today - mobile, connected, mediated by technology. How often do you see a mobile phone on stage? Of course, they usually get a mention before the curtain rises - but they are off and out of sight on both sides of the fourth wall once the action starts.

Sam H Freeman's Scarlet (at Southwark Playhouse until 9 May) takes on the challenge of portraying young adults' lives as they are lived, and succeeds - something that should be commonplace, but just isn't. Scarlet is a 21st-century woman: she has boyfriends (and the occasional girlfriend) when she wants them; worries about her student loan and is on and off social media all day, every day. But when she gets hammered one night and the alcohol talks, her hangover is the least of her concerns. A lad she ever so gently rejected some weeks earlier has ever so ungently videoed the evening and uploaded her sex talk to Facebook. It's shared (how benign a word that is for so invasive an action) and soon she has hundreds of friend requests and her own fan page. And then her life starts to unravel.

The play is essentially a first-person monologue, but Freeman has come up with the brilliant conceit of casting four actresses to play Scarlet simultaneously. It sounds tricksy (especially when they also play a handful of key characters in Scarlet's tale), but director Joe Hufton keeps a tight rein on who is saying what and is rewarded by having four actors to move around the set, which allows him to capture the youthful energy of Scarlet's life and to reflect, especially in the second half, how her life has fragmented. It's not quite on the "London Road" scale of theatrical boldness, but it's a thrilling and exceptionally well constructed framework, exploited to the full.

The four Scarlets (Lucy Kilpatrick, Jade Ogugua, Heida Reed and Asha Reid) retain their own accents and personalities, but still fuse as one Scarlet in our minds - you can believe in her. They get a few laughs when taking on the characters of Scarlet's various men, but most of this black comedy's humour comes from the growing sense that the farcical situations into which Scarlet is tumbling could happen to any of us. It's shocking to think that it must be happening to many young women today.

This is a first full length play from the writer and it shows plenty of promise. It's not perfect of course - it could stand to lose 20 minutes or so to tighten the plot and the ending is a bit of a letdown after a tremendous build up. But the faults are much outweighed by the successes - and by the willingness of the cast and creatives to show us what lives are really like, right here, right now.

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