Guest Post: Director Marlie Haco On Gendered Violence, Exploitation, And Reviving FIREBIRD At Southwark Playhouse

Since the 2010s, grooming gangs have remained a recurring feature of the British news cycle. Yet despite investigations, inquiries and prosecutions, the issue remains unresolved. There often seems to be a collective reluctance to engage with the reality of what these experiences mean for the survivors who live through them.

Recent events only reinforce that feeling. Take, for example, the decision of a judge not to impose custodial sentences on two teenage boys convicted of raping two girls earlier this year. Although the Court of Appeal has since overturned this decision, it still reflects a troubling reality: deeply ingrained attitudes towards women and girls continue to shape how experiences of abuse and gendered violence are misunderstood, dismissed or minimised.

This summer I am reviving Phil Davies's play Firebird at Southwark Playhouse. When I first read the play, I was struck by how urgent it felt. Written over a decade ago, its exploration of child sexual exploitation and the systemic failures that allow it to continue feels even more pressing today.

While researching for Firebird, I revisited Three Girls, the BBC drama that follows three survivors of a Rochdale grooming gang. Based on testimony, extensive research, and court records, it exposes with devastating clarity the repeated failures of adults and institutions to recognise vulnerable girls as victims in need of protection. Yet despite winning multiple industry awards, the show did not gain the kind of widespread national attention required to drive real change.

By contrast, when Netflix released Adolescence - a drama centring a fictional young boy influenced by online incel culture - it dominated public discussion. It was encouraging to see a TV series prompt serious debate about the radicalisation of young people. Politicians, commentators and educators all seemed eager to engage with the questions it raised. The Prime Minister even met with the show’s creators to rethink online safety.

Perhaps theatre can provoke a deeper engagement with what’s happening to girls across the UK by using the tools of live performance to bring us closer to their lived experience.

While Three Girls powerfully presents events with documentary realism, Firebird is full of absences and gaps. This mirrors the way traumatic experiences disrupt chronology; erasing certain passages of time while preserving others in startling detail. Our production embraces this fragmentation, seeking to capture the vicissitudes of surviving grooming and abuse. We’ve created an increasingly claustrophobic visual environment, reflecting the narrowing world of a young person being manipulated and controlled. A raised playing space sustains a sense of precarity and danger: the feeling that one could fall, or be pushed over the edge, at any moment. Sudden flashes of light and a jagged, dissonant score plunge us further into the protagonist’s interior world, where traumatic memory remains raw and unprocessed, manifesting as vivid sensations and images.

Theatre's power lies in its liveness, where the act of witnessing becomes collective. This is especially true in small spaces like the Little at Southwark Playhouse, where we’re staging Firebird. The proximity of the actors to the audience, and the audience’s ability to see one another, creates a particular kind of discomfort, even complicity. Theatre can’t replace journalism, policy, or the criminal justice system - but it can create a space in which people confront the difficult human reality behind the headlines. It can challenge assumptions and complicate easy narratives, inviting us, if only for the duration of a performance, to sit with the experiences of those who are too often misunderstood or left out of the conversation altogether.

I’m under no illusion that a theatre piece could have the same reach as a Netflix show. Nor do I expect audiences to leave having learned a set of new facts about grooming gangs. But I do hope they leave with a deeper understanding of coercion, vulnerability and institutional neglect, and above all, a greater empathy for the young girls who endure the unimaginable and survive it. Perhaps, then, a real conversation might begin.

Firebird is at the Southwark Playhouse Borough until 1 August

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