Girls runs in the Young Vic's Maria Theatre from Thursday 22 October to Saturday 21 November 2026.
Theresa Ikoko wrote Girls in 2016, about three schoolgirls held captive after being taken from their school by an armed group, and she wrote it as a comedy — three teenagers arguing about boys, hair and each other, inside a situation the audience already knows the outside of from the news. That decision is the whole play. It refuses to turn the girls into a cause, and it makes the audience notice how completely the reporting had.
It won her the George Devine, the Alfred Fagon and the Susan Smith Blackburn prizes, which for a first play is close to unprecedented, and Ikoko has since written for film. Ikoko had spent years working with young people before she wrote it, and the ear for how teenagers actually speak to each other is what makes the comedy hold.
It returns in the Maria at the Young Vic from Thursday 22 October to Saturday 21 November 2026, with the theatre’s 2026 JMK award winner directing. The Maria is the small room, programmed in parallel with the main house rather than after it, and it seats around a hundred and fifty — close enough that three actors talking to each other is the entire event. Five weeks in that room is a substantial run, and it plays against Thelma & Louise next door for most of it.