FLUSH by April Hope Miller – ★★★★☆
The girls’ toilet is a sanctuary. This is a known fact, one that is learned through experience and folklore. It might start in secondary school, where an unbreakable chain made of pre-teen interlinked hands makes its way to musty bathroom stalls at lunch time, after one of your friends announces that she needs to use the toilet. Or, you’ll learn it on a night out, when you’ve gone to the toilet to powder your oily nose, only to end up unpacking the life story of a girl you just met, who you will follow on Instagram and never meaningfully speak to again, but knowing you’ll always have that night. It’s a feeling like no other. A cultivation of sisterhood, togetherness and the power of being seen and heard. Set entirely inside a girls’ toilet of a seedy club in East London, April Hope Miller gives us a snapshot of what this feels like in her play FLUSH. Cutting across the entire spectrum of womanhood, FLUSH is an intricate and complex inside look into the secrets of the ladies’ room. Hilarious, but warm and heartfelt, Miller pens a play that has something for everyone.
Three latrines sit in front of heavily graffiti-covered walls, and the music starts to beat somewhere off stage. Ellie Wintour’s set design drops us in a club in Dalston almost instantly. It’s a familiar setting, and we are made to sit in it before the action begins, but not for long. The show starts with two women, hiding in cubicles from bad Hinge dates and secondary school frenemies, finding solace in each other’s shame, and then finding laughter in the trauma shared.
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This is followed by a carousel of different women played by Ayesha Griffiths, Jazz Jenkins, Miya Ocego, Joanna Strafford and Miller, swanning in and out of the toilet doors. Facing the audience, we become the toilet mirrors, and each woman’s reflection reveals something different. There’s a gang of bridesmaids being hunted by the full force of a drunken Irish maid of honour with a bone to pick with everyone, including the bride, an entourage of mini-skirt-clad teenage girls who have snuck into the club with fake IDs, and failed attempts to conceal the wide-eyed wistfulness of adolescence. Miller’s characters are authentic, and delivered with palpable energy; each member of the cast demonstrates versatility, physical comedy and constant energy.
The world-building starts a little slow and it was difficult to see where the story was going until we meet Billie (Jenkins) a young American girl, new to London, trying to find her place in a city of fleeting faces. The only cast member to play a single character, Jenkins’ Billie and her story becomes the show’s pillar. Her story is a tragic one, as she falls victim to an incident of sexual assault and struggles to find her way back on her feet. In this, though, through connections that might seem unsubstantial from the outside, but feel like true sisterhood and camaraderie, she finds help in the arms of the girls you’ll only meet in the ladies of a random nightclub.
There are numerous interlocking stories and issues that run in and out of each other, mirroring the women running in and out of the toilets. Miller is able to tackle transphobia, an eating disorder, a (casual but worrisome) drug habit, coming-of-age, consent and loneliness in a way that perfectly imitates life and a night out; things coming and going but the motion of life persisting regardless. Heaviness and heartbreak walking alongside some of the deepest and heartiest laughs of your life, and going along with both of them. FLUSH is almost documentary-like, and it ends this way too.
One thing FLUSH is sure to make you do is laugh, from feeling seen and also the sheer spectacle of women unfiltered and unadulterated. Heartwarming, heartbreaking, real and hilarious, FLUSH is for the girls, gays and everyone who wants to know what really goes down in the girls’ toilets.
★★★★☆
By Melody Adebisi
FLUSH is showing at Arcola Theatre until 06 June