Bedtime Stories for Girls

Downstairs at The Butterfly Club, four girls in pyjamas walk down the rows of seats to get to the stage, all tittering and laughing. Ascending the stage, they sprawl out in a traditional sleepover tableau. These girls are nameless, and largely without a defining character trait. They’re more monster than girl.

This is Bedtime Stories for Girls. The bedtime stories they tell are pure gossip fodder, the kind of nasty, unrelenting stories about other young girls that are traded around high schools like currency. The girls slandered in conversation (one of the girls, the “alpha”, describes hating a classmate named Elle so much that she wouldn’t bother putting her out if she were on fire) are inversely perceived by the foursome as weak for having “let” such things happen to them. There is no empathy amongst these girls. Tales of STIs are common; other girls are routinely described as “sluts” with a shocking venom; lesbians are perceived as abnormal, even predatory.

The sleepover starts out innocently enough, and presents the girls as very young. In fact, age and time seems malleable here—the girls are presented at first as pre-adolescent, afraid of kissing, boys, their own bodies. Later, they seem to grow more confident; time rolls on, and a bottle of vodka appears. The girl take turns in drinking it, while screaming and dancing along to a pop song. Talk turns to sex; they simulate sex with a Barbie and Ken doll, and then elaborately stage an abortion (for laughs). One girl confidently recites the step-by-step process for ‘How to give a good blow job’ and then they all simulate the instructions, while violently gagging.

It’s hard to ascertain the message that the playwright Genevieve Atkins (who also plays the aforementioned “alpha”) is trying to convey. Amongst these girls, there is no solidarity, or empowerment, or growth on display here. None of the girls speak very nicely to each other; later calling one of their own “pretty” as if it’s a threat to the rest of them, and violently pounding at her with a pillow. Another girl complains about not being skinny enough. They all lambast her and accuse her of anorexia. Though the girl denies having an eating disorder, the “alpha” steps in, and demands her to prove it: “Eat a handful of snakes.” When the girl refuses, the “alpha” force-feeds her snakes, while the others hold her down. It’s a tense, unnerving scene, held in silence by its audience. When they are finally satisfied, the girl being held down asks to be let go. But they can’t let her go. Because they care about her.

This play is a reminder that to be anything different at this nascent time of adolescence is to be rife for ridicule, and shame. By the end of the play, the “alpha” reveals that one of the girls is being molested by her step-father, and blames her by outright stating that she is inviting his advances. The girls all begin to fight each other, rage-fuelled, and then the violence is over, and one of the girls shrieks, “Do you think we’ll be friends forever?”

Though Atkins captures some key observations about the way adolescent girls talk about each other, there is little perception or insight made here. The acting is fine, though the blocking of the play meant that, a few rows back, I could hardly see a lot of the action, as the girls were often on the floor of the stage. Bedtimes Stories for Young Girls certainly captures the horrors of adolescence, but little else. Maybe that was the whole point.

Bedtime Stories Girls 
The Butterfly Club, 5 Carson Place, off Little Collins Street, Melbourne CBD
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