School Girls - Or, The African Mean Girls

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School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play drops a new pupil into an elite girls' boarding school in 1986, three weeks before a recruiter arrives to choose a contestant for the national beauty pageant. The reigning queen bee has been planning for this her entire school career. The new girl is lighter-skinned. Paulina runs the cafeteria by force of personality and a good deal of cruelty, and her friends have learned the rules. Ericka's arrival upsets all of it, not because she wants to compete but because the adults immediately prefer her. What follows is a very funny comedy about adolescent hierarchy that turns, without much warning, into something sharper about colourism and who gets told they count as beautiful. Jocelyn Bioh wrote the play, which had its first production in 2017 and has been staged widely since. It is written for a company of eight, all women, and it moves at the speed of a sitcom while carrying the shape of a tragedy in miniature. The comedy is exact — the insults, the shifting alliances, the currency of imported snacks — and the cruelty is recognisable to anyone who has been sixteen. Bioh gives every character a reason, including the worst of them, and the play's turn depends on the audience having laughed at Paulina before they understand her. It suits audiences who like quick, sharply drawn character comedy with something serious underneath. It works best live, where a room laughing and then abruptly not laughing is precisely the effect the writing is engineering.