What Every Girl Should Know

Set in an American Catholic reformatory at the beginning of last century, What Every Girl Should Know is a subtle and scorching examination of the lives of a group of girls (played by Rachel Kamath, Vivian Nguyen, and Shirong Wu) whose insular lives are shaken with the arrival of Joan (played by Ravenna Bouckaert), an activist's daughter who has been sent away after resisting her abusive police officer father. What follows is a searing look at how patriarchy and its systems of power overlook and excuse cyclical patterns of abuse and trauma. 

It becomes clear that these characters, naive as they might first appear, are victims of violence who have been all too easy to lock away out of sight. Clutching for any alternatives to the rules and rituals of the reformatory, the girls are inspired by Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist and sex educator, whose scandalous pamphlet Joan has stashed away under her bed. Cathy Hunt’s direction has led to four superb performances, and the nuance each actor brings to their characters is to be commended. The sense of playfulness, the joy of camaraderie, the rivalries and the frustrations that emerge between the girls are each artfully realised, and the moments of comedy are consistently strong. While for the most part the production is tightly paced and uses its time well, the beats of the plot are occasionally broken up with movement portions, set to incongruous modern music, which cause the play’s momentum to falter. 

The horror of the later scenes, as the danger of the reformatory is slowly but surely made clear, is compounded by emphases on the depths of ignorance the girls have about their bodies, and the lack of understanding and vocabulary they have for the traumas which have led them to reformatory life are drawn out to chilling effect. It’s a difficult play that seeks to disturb and question how the patterns illuminated here continue today. It’s a challenging task, but one which What Every Girl Should Know executes with precision and power. As the second production of Between The Buildings Theatre Company, it marks the outfit as one to look out for.