EV Crowe, the young dramatist responsible for Kin, a promising and disturbing new play, is unlikely to be invited to present the prizes at her old school should she develop into a major writer in years to come.
I have always had an embarrassing soft spot for the girls’-school stories of Angela Brazil and Enid Blyton, but Crowe’s account of life in such an institution has more in common with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies than the thrilling lacrosse matches and midnight feasts of popular fiction.
Her 10- and 11-year-old girls, enduring life in the school’s junior wing, swear like troopers, and regard anorexia (nicknamed “annie”) as glamorous. They also know all about sex, order a despised classmate to perform a handstand without her knickers on, while the denouement turns on whether one of the girls has given another a love bite.
Of the happy innocence of youth there isn’t the faintest flicker. These girls are cruel when they aren’t miserable, and they can’t even talk honestly to their parents on the payphone because there are always others eavesdropping on their conversations.
In Jeremy Herrin’s production, featuring terrific child actresses who seem every bit as young as the characters they are playing, Kin feels horribly persuasive, though an over-elaborate time scheme makes it unnecessarily difficult to follow the narrative line. And the fact that the children are also rehearsing a production of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, with its own account of girlhood hysteria, seems a contrivance too many.
Nevertheless Kin has the vigour and detail of vividly recollected experience, and scarily compelling performances from the young cast, with strong adult support from Annette Badland as the weary housemistress, who compares her devious and sometimes savage young charges to “small dogs in packs and pairs, doing what small dogs do”.
If you have a young child at boarding school I would give this play a miss. It could cause you pain, guilt and acute anxiety.
'Kin’ tickets: 0207 565 5000