Theresa Ikoko’s award-winning play returns to London for the first time since its 2016 premiere, in the Young Vic’s Maria studio and in the hands of Ewa Dina, this year’s JMK Award winner. Here is everything you need to know before you book.
It is ten years since Theresa Ikoko’s Girls was first staged, and the play has spent most of that decade being talked about rather than seen. It won the Alfred Fagon Award in 2015 and the George Devine Award in 2016, and was a finalist for the Verity Bargate Award, before reaching an audience at the HighTide Festival in 2016 in a production shared with Soho Theatre and Talawa. This autumn it arrives at the Young Vic for a strictly limited run in the Maria, the building’s smallest space, directed by the winner of the 2026 JMK Award. It is the first London staging of the play since that premiere.
Who is starring in Girls?
Three actors carry the whole play. Hannah Akhalu plays Tisana, Tara Tijani plays Haleema and Sewa Zamba plays Ruhab. Akhalu has appeared in Cinderella at the Rose Theatre and in Every Leaf a Hallelujah at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Tijani returns to the Young Vic, where she was in Beauty or Beast? A series of interviews, and has worked at Shakespeare’s Globe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Zamba was in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at the Lyric Hammersmith and in Shakespeare with Dame Judi Dench at The Mill at Sonning.
What is Girls about?
The play is set in Nigeria in 2014. Tisana, Haleema and Ruhab are best friends and entirely ordinary teenagers, preoccupied with celebrities, food and sex, until they are taken from their school by militant insurgents. What follows is not a thriller about rescue. Ikoko keeps the three of them together in captivity and watches what happens to a friendship when fear settles in and the religious differences between them, which had never mattered before, begin to. It is funny far more often than a summary of it suggests, which is the quality that made the play’s reputation in the first place.
Who is behind the production?
Ewa Dina directs, making her Young Vic debut with the production that won her the 2026 JMK Award. The award has been made annually since 1997 by the JMK Trust, founded in memory of the director James Menzies-Kitchin, and its earlier winners include Thea Sharrock, Bijan Sheibani and Roy Alexander Weise; a JMK production is therefore worth watching as much for the director as for the play. Set and costume design is by Raphaé Memon, with lighting by Simisola Majekodunmi, composition by féz, sound design by Munotida Chinyanga, movement direction by dkfash and fight and intimacy direction by Haruka Kuroda. Samantha Adams is production dramatherapist and Maddie Bevan costume supervisor, with Carmel Macraee as production manager, Lavinia Serban as stage manager and Shaneice Brown as deputy stage manager.
Dina said of her company: “I’m thrilled to be working with these three women. Each of them has demonstrated a deep commitment to telling this story with authenticity and nuance. I trust them implicitly to bring their humanity and artistry into the work and can’t wait to get into the room!”
When and where can I see it?
Girls runs in the Maria at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut, from Thursday 22 October to Saturday 21 November 2026, with press night on Tuesday 27 October at 7pm. Performances are Monday to Saturday at 8pm, with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday at 3pm. There is a captioned performance on Thursday 12 November at 8pm, a BSL-interpreted performance on Friday 13 November at 8pm and a relaxed performance on Wednesday 18 November at 3pm. The Maria seats fewer than a hundred, so a five-week run is a smaller number of tickets than the dates imply; booking is open now on the Girls show page.
What else should I book if I like it?
Four suggestions, all of them plays rather than musicals and all of them at roughly this scale. Samira at the National’s Dorfman, from 4 February 2027, is the closest match in subject: a woman at the centre of a revolution, and what it costs her. Fences at the Lyric Hammersmith, 6-31 October 2026, overlaps with this run and is the August Wilson play most often named alongside it for the way family loyalty and injustice pull against each other. Global Majority at the Bush Theatre, from 25 November 2026, picks up almost exactly where Girls leaves off in the calendar and is new writing in another small room that does this well. And Gem of the Ocean brings Nadia Fall’s production of another Wilson play to the Young Vic itself in May 2027, for anyone who wants to go back to the same building.
