It has been almost 15 years since the exposure of organised child sexual exploitation grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham first hit the headlines, horrifying a nation about what had been going on, and the mistakes made by police and council officials. In 2015, Rochdale’s Phil Davies penned Firebird, a stark, unflinching play about a young girl exploited and abused in such a gang, with this new staging of the work over a decade later still ferociously relevant.
In this production, directed inventively and imaginatively by Marlie Haco, the story shifts to Scotland, a country having its own reckoning on such crimes in more recent years. Despite the shift in location, the play’s story is centred upon teenager Tia (Mollie Milne), who is groomed by AJ (Taqi Nazeer). What follows, over 90 rage-inducing minutes, is the systematic targeting, abuse and exploitation of Tia’s character, where Davies’s writing is lifted by Haco’s superb direction, as well as the necessary yet infuriating failures of the police and care system. Davies’s script resists the temptation to make this a play about culture and race. Tia is groomed, initially, in a kebab shop. While the script does lift very much from real-life events to establish its exposition, the chain of events which happen to Tia are deliberately universal, a stark warning to audiences about the permanent dangers of young people in 21st-century Britain.
As Tia, Milne is superb in representing a young girl haunted and terrorised by repeated and dreadful abuses. Milne’s careful construction of Tia’s character, initially brash and frustrating in a loud and obnoxious introduction, is a deft touch by both Milne and Haco as the piece then shifts into Tia’s awful experiences. Tia is kept in a constant state of intoxication, with reluctance, with Milne controlling this effectively to never allow Tia’s character to lose the sense of childhood innocence that the men around her rob her of. Moreover, Milne excels with subtle facial expressions and a frantic arm twitch that magnifies the trauma she suppresses, in a captivating and devastating lead performance.
As abuser AJ, Nazeer is careful not to lead with sinister straight away. AJ is an uneasy character, whose motivations upon his first appearance are unclear. Haco’s deliberate direction of AJ to be suave and charming creates a skin-crawling sense of dread during his first interaction with Tia, setting the tone for the rest of the powerful piece.
Rounding off the trio is the superb Kelise Gordon-Harrison, who doubles as Tia’s new teenage friend, also in the care system, Katie, as well as Tia’s useless care worker, Deborah. Gordon-Harrison excels despite the challenge of playing two completely different roles here; first, neatly crafting the sweet and naive Katie, whose friendship with Tia feels alarming, and secondly, completely infuriating as the frustrating, seemingly uninterested care worker Deborah, whose attitude towards Tia’s character is left deliberately ambiguous.
Where Firebird becomes an unforgettable watch, however, is through the combination of Haco’s direction, Tomás Palmer’s tremendous set design and Ben Jacobs’s striking lighting choices. Haco’s creative direction allows dialogue-heavy duologues to breathe and evoke tension, while maintaining a sense of tight control over the piece that makes each character feel authentic. Scene changes are sharp and abrupt, keeping a sense of momentum that mirrors the spiralling of Tia’s life, highlighting her psychological collapse viscerally for the horrified audience.
Performed on an elevated stage, a large ceiling lingers over Tia, moving up and down at great speed to highlight her sense of entrapment and confinement, both under AJ’s abuse and society’s ignorance. This is mirrored by Jacobs’s choice of fluorescent light strips, which not only highlight the seedy bedroom Tia is left in, but also work to interrogate Tia, leaving her exposed and brutally illuminated, a reflection of her violent loss of childhood innocence.
Moreover, though, the production succeeds in evoking one particular emotion: rage. Firebird tells an important story, and one that is necessarily brutal in its presentation, to evoke a sense of fury about how Tia, and girls like her, were abused and exploited by disgusting men, and let down by a failing system. While the story may be fifteen years older, the anger and frustration Firebird generates feels just as raw today.
It is an uncomfortable, memorable, harrowing piece of theatre, and one that lingers long after its poignant conclusion.
