Theatre review: Victim Sidekick, Boyfriend Me - Edinburgh Traverse Theatre

LAST YEAR, as part of the NT Connections Festival, the Lyceum’s impressive youth company staged a fine production of Bassett, James Graham’s intense 50-minute play about the town that honoured Britain’s war dead from Iraq and Afghanistan.

This year, they offer a more fragmented short-format approach and if the impact is necessarily more diffuse, they still demonstrate some formidable levels of theatrical energy, skill and focus.

At the Traverse, the evening opened with a selection of three short five-minute plays from a series of seven recently written by LYT members. The first featured a powerful family conflict, the second a girl’s agonised inner dialogue with herself, and the third a truly comic encounter between a sceptical girl and her gender-bending brother. All three would make strong candidates for the National Theatre of Scotland’s next round of online five-minute theatre.

The centrepiece of the evening, though, was playwright’s Hilary Bell’s 35-minute piece Victim Sidekick Boyfriend Me, about a girl who initiates a bullying campaign that drives another girl to her death. The girl’s best friend takes the rap, and the victim’s boyfriend makes a show of forgiveness, but the play spirals into a disturbing study of how too much forgiveness can deny offenders the chance to pay their debt to society, and move on. It’s a complex theme for a short play, only sketched out in a series of short, highly-choreographed scenes, but it’s beautifully handled by director Christie O’Carroll’s young company of 16 actors, led by a frighteningly convincing Madeleine Todd as the girl.

Rating: ****