By Louise
Link: https://sohotheatreondemand.com/show/birdsandbees
Available until: Sunday 28th March. You can rent Birds and Bees for 48 hours.
Age rating: 14+
Content warning: Birds and Bees contains direct and indirect discussion around panic attacks and suicide, flashing images, as well as infrequent swear words.
There has been a lot of information lately about sex education in schools. Things are changing and I’m very glad. I have learned about homosexual sex education as well as heterosexual sex education. A lot of students know everything already and they don’t need to learn it at school, but it’s still really important that it happens. Some students might not have all the accurate information and I think an important part of it is to provide validation and acknowledgement for students who are not heterosexual or don’t identify with the traditional genders.
My six year old brother and sister are learning sex education too. They obviously don’t know all the details, but they know what belongs to them and that it should never be touched by other people. I hope they will never be in a situation where they need to say that, but it’s still good for them to be aware of things like that and to respect their own bodies as well as other people’s.
Birds and Bees has four characters and they’re all in detention. A school couple, Cherelle and Jack, have taken very personal photos which have gone viral. The four students in detention have been affected by this. Aarron and Leilah, who are also a couple, are friends with Jack and Cherelle. Maisey, who is a star student, has committed the crime of being nearby when it happened. She tells the others they have to work together to produce a speech about sex education to read in Assembly tomorrow. Billy is there for different reasons, but as they are non-binary, they are interested in sex and gender politics and annoyed with the focus on heterosexual male/female couples.
Writer Charlie Josephine has written the detention scene very well. I haven’t been in detention yet, so I asked my brother Jack and my sister Imogen what it was like. Jack says it’s a bit boring and annoying, but not really any worse than school in general. Imogen says it depends on which boys are in detention with you.
The play isn’t boring or annoying and it wasn’t just the boy who livened things up, but I do think detention in the play is a lot like school in real life. The script is very realistic. Aarron and Leilah are very defensive and quick to react angrily to anything that seems like a criticism or which is not very conventional or which is much too conventional. Aarron struggles with the idea of Billy not being a boy or a girl and he and Leilah aren’t very impressed when they find out Maisey wants to get on with her work. There’s something else teens do sometimes where they’ll be on someone’s side but then they’ll suddenly switch sides and support the opposite point of view and that happens in the play too. It actually makes me quite nervous watching it because it feels so real and the characters remind me a lot of real people I know at school. I think it is a minefield being at school sometimes. It’s so easy to get it wrong and so difficult for it to be forgotten about afterwards.
The script is mostly written in a conventional sort of way, but there are some moments when the characters do a monologue in verse and sometimes you get close-ups and distorted images of people which I think is supposed to represent the emotions inside them. I think these moments are very clever and interesting. Rob Watt is the director and I like the way he lets the actors move around the stage so much. It’s very realistic and it makes the atmosphere even stronger.
The acting is really good. The characters and their emotions are expressed really well, but even though some of the characters are scarily aggressive, there is something quite vulnerable and likeable about all of them. They are kids and they are going through a really difficult time. Ike Bennett’s anger as Aarron often has a sort of helplessness and Narisha Lawson’s Leilah is probably a lot more scared than she wants anyone to know. Isa Regan shows Maisey’s intelligence and naïveté. EM Williams (who was also Puck in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Dream) is calm and self-assured, but it’s not easy for them either.
Birds and Bees is very well-written and well-acted
and I think it would be a really good production for schools to watch.
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