Girls Really Listen to Me. Pleasance Theatre.

“It’s boring being hotter and smarter than all of your classmates” 16 year-old rich kid Maddie tells us between selfies and tarting up for a night’s clubbing with a promoter close to three times her age. The youth has blood red fingernails, a skimpy black dress on beneath her school uniform, and a mean streak as wide as the Hudson river. Blunt, picky, and sarcastic, Maddie, in the form of New York-born writer and performer Eleanor Greene, is nothing less than a fully rounded and deliciously watchable teenage uber-bitch. Think a nastier, darker, and more twisted fugitive from Hollywood hit movie Mean Girls.

Maddie’s new best friend forever is 15 year-old Maria who is middle class and lives in a humble apartment in Brooklyn. Maria has the kind of mum “who encourages kindness and doing the right thing”, neither of which is an asset to Maddie’s money-grubbing mind. Her own mum is a hedge fund titan whose parenting style involves a personal social media manager and random checks on Maddie’s Amex statement (charges for anything other than high-end clothes invite red flags).

Intent on doing Maria a favour Maddie sets her up on a date with school senior Piers, who is nowhere near as chivalrous as he appears. The venue for the date is a house party with too much booze and no adult supervision. What could go wrong? When Maria fails to show up at school for a week Maddie begins to wonder whether her absence is “low-key attention seeking” or something more sinister. Maddie is soon faced with a stark decision: do the right thing by her erstwhile friend, even if that means threatening a long-desired one-way ticket to an Ivy League college. Mum has her own brutally frank point of view to offer: “there is no donation large enough to get you into Havard if you’re expelled for this”, she warns.

Greene’s top-notch, pitch-dark comic monologue Girls Really Listen to Me covers familiar ground: issues of consent, peer pressure, and the toxic consequences of too much money and too little parenting. The piece comes to few novel conclusions, but Maddie emerges as a complex, damaged character, whose memorable almost monstrous grotesqueness masks deeply felt demons. Greene deftly captures the cadences, cognitive divergences, and random callousness of the average 15-year old without ever losing empathy for her tremendous creation. Maddie is as much sinned against as sinner. The Pleasance Theatre’s run of Girls Really Listen to Me is a preview for the Edinburgh Fringe. Catch it there if you can.

Writer:  Eleanor Greene

Director:  Alex Prescot