Unlike Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers or the jolly-hockey-sticks hi-jinks of St Trinians, EV Crowe’s Kin paints a bleaker and more sinister picture of life inside a private girls’ boarding school.
Rather than the traditional quaint view of English boarding schools, Kin unveils a darker world of vicious rivalries, fractured families, secrets and lies, distrust, bullying and the desolation of solitude.
Born out of The Royal Court’s Young Writers programme and directed by Royal Court Deputy Artistic Director Jeremy Herrin, Crowe’s Royal Court debut centres around two main protagonists, 10-year olds Mimi and Janey. While the precocious intelligent Mimi, played tonight by Ciara Southwood, rehearses for the school production of The Crucible, with its parallels to the girls’ hothouse school world of intrigue and accusation, sneaky, manipulative Janey (Mimi Keene) is desperately hanging on to her best friend status.
The girls’ language is coded, intensely profane and packed with insider references such as ‘going annie’ for anorexia or ‘whispers’ for illicit late-night chats, and episodes such as queuing anxiously for the pay phone to speak to far-flung parents paint an authentic picture of life for young children removed from the family nest.
They are presided over by a semi-neurotic, authoritarian teacher who describes her charges as, “…small dogs headmistress, in packs or pairs, doing what small dogs do”. Mrs B, played by Annette Badland, clearly thinks her job is to tame the girls, catch them breaking her stringent rules and unveil their deceptions, as opposed to fostering their learning. She is less teacher, more deranged policewoman.
The plot, as such, is of a complex friendship that disintegrates when Mimi accuses Janey of being a bully, only to find that on Janey’s expulsion she is more alone than ever. In not much over an hour, Kin addresses a series of issues, and it would be interesting to see how an extended version would have expanded on the themes this touches upon; the girls’ fledgling sexuality, the English private school system, the breakdown of middle-class family units and the interpersonal dynamics of young children.
With some clever staging devices, a liberal lacing of dark humour and no holds barred language given great impact coming from the mouths of such slight, young girls, Kin is a convincing snapshot of boarding school regime, with much credit going to the vibrant young performers who combine innocence and knowing deviousness to excellent effect.
For those whose view of the English public school system verges on the rose-tinted, Kin rejects that chocolate-box portrayal to present a dark, essentially unhappy world, and the audience is left with the question of whether these children, our own children, or any children, are, as Crowe sees them, a fascinating fusion of the cruelly manipulative and the innocently needy.
NB