It is not uncommon for plays dealing with challenging or sensitive issues to have certain trigger warnings but ‘Pests’ had no less than a remarkable ten separate triggers listed (some of which were broken even down into specific sub-warnings!). This challenging play was not written to entertain or simply inform but to put not just the characters but the entire audience in an uncomfortable place as the broken lives of two young women disintegrated in front of their eyes.
If Vicki Pollard in Little Britain was a caricature of the broken lives of the underclass, Pink and Rolly represented the reality of life for young people living in squalid poverty where all normalities had become blurred. This two-hander, with ran continuously for 90 minutes, demonstrated how many different social problems can become interlinked with devastating consequences. The girls were on drugs, one was illiterate and neither had any form of employment with a shared past that included prison, violence, sexual abuse, extreme poverty and general trauma. It was not hard to see how they were trapped in a world leading to mental illness with no real sense of hope.
The relationship the girls had with each other was dysfunctional and co-dependent with violence giving way to laughter and then back again at a moment’s notice. Watching everything unfold was not easy, often making you want to turn away whilst at the same time feeling a desperate longing to see how things would unfold in the faint hope that something just might come right. There were occasional moments of humour but they never lasted for long. This was a portrait of a very grim reality.
The staging in the thrust ensured that no audience member was ever far from the action with the various strained emotions and traumas of the character clearly visible at close quarters. The set was a complete mess of half-eaten pizzas, discarded clothes, crumpled bedding and general rubbish, letting the audience know right from the start that the protagonists were at rock bottom. Curiously, a wall at one end of the performance area was papered in a collage of tabloid pages from ‘The Communist Newspaper’ although tape criss-crossing the wall with the word ‘fragile’ repeated suggested that the condition of the girls’ lives was beyond the reach of any single political doctrine.
Writer Vivienne Franzmann's won the 2008 Bruntwood Prize with her play Mogadishu so was no stranger to writing about broken societies, with Somalia being an utterly failed state. ‘Pests’ was set much closer to home and it would be interesting to know what research went into the writing because there was an extraordinary feeling of realism to all the issues depicted. The direction by directed Jess Gough included a lot of physicality, indicative of the way the dysfunctional people often communicate, particularly in expressing emotions, good and bad. Daisy Miles from Stockport as Pink and Oldham actress Kyia KB as Rolly performed a remarkably tight partnership with gripping authenticity. Kyia KB was utterly convincing as an illiterate with very abnormal attitudes to violence, pregnancy and drugs. Daisy Miles gave a powerful performance as someone utterly trapped in a world she so wanted to break out of. With the emotions reaching fever pitch at the climax of the play, the strain was still evident on her face even after the curtain call, showing just what been put into the performance.
This was the debut production from Wisteria theatre company and they have quite literally given themselves a hard act to follow. At the risk of writing a cliché, this is most certainly a company to look out for.
Reviewer - John Waterhouse
On - 3.11.2025
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