Long before Rocks earned Theresa Ikoko a BAFTA nomination for best original screenplay, she wrote a play about three schoolgirls who sound exactly like schoolgirls. They trade gossip about celebrities, compare notes on sex positions and plot their escape from carbohydrates, and then the world they were joking about is taken away from them. Girls was the first of her plays to reach a professional stage, and the Young Vic is now bringing it back to London, releasing a first look inside the rehearsal room for a new production in its intimate Maria Theatre.

In the play, Tisana, Haleema and Ruhab are kidnapped by militant insurgents and marched towards a future none of them can see. Ikoko places it in Nigeria in the year the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls made headlines around the world, but her three friends are invented, not reconstructed. What interests her is the friendship itself: how long it holds once fear, and the religious differences the girls never had to think about, begin to pull it apart.

A young woman in a red dress leans against a blue wall while two figures in white robes spin behind her — Girls by Theresa Ikoko at the Young Vic. Image: Young Vic

The theatre’s announcement leads with a line from the script that sets the register: “They leave a trail of fire and flesh. If they followed it – if somebody followed the stench – they would find us.” It is the voice of a teenager who has learned, far too early, that rescue depends on somebody else paying attention.

The revival is also a debut. Ewa Dina directs as the winner of the 2026 JMK Award, the prize named after the young director James Menzies-Kitchin that hands an early-career director a full professional production. Past winners include Thea Sharrock, Bijan Sheibani and Roy Alexander Weise; for Dina, this is a first production at the Young Vic, a house that calls itself a directors’ theatre.

Hannah Akhalu, seen in Cinderella at the Rose Theatre and Every Leaf a Hallelujah at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, plays Tisana. Tara Tijani, whose credits include A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe and the Young Vic’s own Beauty or Beast? A series of interviews, is Haleema, while Sewa Zamba, from Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at the Lyric Hammersmith, plays Ruhab.

Around them, Raphaé Memon designs set and costumes, Elliott Griggs lights the show, féz composes, Munotida Chinyanga designs the sound and dkfash directs movement, with video by Sophie Bramley and fight and intimacy direction by Haruka Kuroda. One credit says a lot about how carefully the material is handled: the company has a production dramatherapist, Samantha Adams.

Girls arrived with a reputation. 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 premiering at the HighTide Festival in a co-production with Soho Theatre and Talawa Theatre Company and touring to the Edinburgh Fringe the following year.

The new production runs at the Young Vic’s Maria Theatre from 22 October to 21 November 2026, with press night on 27 October. A captioned performance is scheduled for 12 November, a BSL-interpreted performance for 13 November and a relaxed performance for 18 November.

A decade after its first staging, the play’s central question has not aged. It is not whether the girls will be found, but how much of the three of them is left by the time anyone comes looking.

Tags: Young Vic, Ewa Dina, Girls (play), Hannah Akhalu, JMK Award, new plays