On Sunday afternoons, when Ryan Calais Cameron’s wonderful For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy takes a break, the contrastingly girl-centric Instructions for a Teenage Armageddon occupies the stage at London's Garrick Theatre.
Its path of reflecting on milestone moments of someone’s life is a well-trodden one, but with this solo show from Rosie Day, the originality lies in putting the life of a teenager under the microscope.
Whilst we may feel post-pubescents abound in the media, they are in reality one of the underrepresented groups rarely given serious attention in the mainstream, something rather shameful given that 23% of 11 to 16 year olds have a common mental disorder. Surely their time to be heard is overdue.
Day’s heroine is Girl, a 17-year-old who is in most respects really rather ordinary but who finds herself falling into that 23% following the death of her older sister from an eating disorder, an event that amplifies her later experiences.
Alternatingly funny and heart-breakingly moving, Girl’s 13-year-old self has a desert-dry humour and bravado that is informed by her 17-year-old narrator who largely tells it how it is. Girl’s parents and friend Ella get clumsy portrayals via some film projection and are better handled in the narrative, which is entirely from Girl’s perspective.
The writing packages Girl’s experiences sequentially and episodically between voiceovers from the leader of the scout group she has joined, which occasionally jar in tone with the preceding passage like misplaced punctuation.
Despite these imperfections, the discomfort of witnessing the turbulence and trauma accrue is not diminished, and the play needs an ending which is less tritely neat than its present one if it is to be elevated to the standard of some of the earlier scenes.
Playing Girl is Charithra Chandran, making her West End debut having become familiar to television watchers for the thriller Alex Rider and the Netflix period drama, Bridgerton.
Chandran’s Girl is immediately likeable and recognisable, and her performance carries off this 80-minute entertaining, if often difficult, watch. She provides an underlying youthful innocence across the age gap between narrator and younger self so that the text’s truisms emerge from the mouths of babes with a surprising punch to the gut.
Rosie Day’s show, in which she originally played Girl at The Old Red Lion in 2020 and then two years later at Southwark Playhouse, has since been developed into a book and now a television series waits in the pipeline. Hopefully, it will start a trend where the voice of teenagers is treated less dismissively by writers across the spectrum.
Instructions for a Teenage Armageddon cannot help but resonate with Generation Z and parents who have experienced their children’s teenage years; even those who have been spared the distresses carried by Girl will feel the weight of it. It is a burden young people should not be left to carry alone.