School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play review – clever comedy leaves a stinging afterburn

All the standard high-school movie tropes are in here: there’s the queen bee and her adoring/terrified acolytes; the enticing new girl; the stern headmistress with a heart of gold. But in transplanting this overworn format to Ghana in the 80s, Ghanaian American writer Jocelyn Bioh has sharpened up it up and created a funny but biting play packed with clever laughs that come with a stinging afterburn.

School Girls premiered in the US in 2017 and is inspired by a real-life event in 2011, when a US-born, Minnesota-raised mixed-race woman – with arguably a better hope of faring well on a global stage – was named winner of the Miss Universe Ghana beauty pageant. It’s a story that raises difficult questions about who defines beauty, and the awful knock-on effects it can have. Yet despite this specific context, there is plenty about Monique Touko’s warm and engaging production that will feel painfully and amusingly familiar to everyone. The terrible fragility of teenage friendship. The need to fit in yet also stand out. That burning desire for a big and beautiful future.

There’s a cracking karaoke scene which sees the girls perform Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All to a snooty member of the pageant selection committee. It’s brilliantly awful. First we laugh, then we cry. Aline David’s choreography is skilfully woven into the entire show but it’s here, as the girls squeak along to Whitney, that the dancing feels most powerful and reveals the girls’ true identities and influences, whether they like it or not.

All the actors shine but it is Tara Tijani as queen bee Paulina – destined to become Ghana’s beauty queen until a lighter-skinned transfer student comes along – who taps into the heart of Bioh’s play. As selection day for the pageant draws closer, Paulina bursts on to stage in a pink monstrosity of a dress; so wrong, yet trying so very hard to be right. But there’s more. As the audience’s guilty laughter fades, Paulina smears skin-whitening cream over her face. It’s heartbreaking, as we watch this beautiful Black woman tear strips off her own skin in a quest to fit a western standard of beauty she cannot hope to meet.