Miriam Battye has some capital-T thoughts about the state of modern sex and relationships. That much was clear in Strategic Love Play, her sharply written, Fringe First Award-winning 2023 two-hander, about an unnamed couple going on a first date and debating whether they should commit to a life together simply because they may never find anything more satisfying. Bleak? A little. Hilarious? Absolutely.
For her new play, Battye – a writer on the final season of HBO’s Succession – has cast her mind back further. As the title suggests, The Virgins is a meditation on teenagerdom and that first sexual experience ushering in adulthood. Reviewers might have called Strategic Love Play (which premiered at Edinburgh Fringe in 2023 then transferred to Soho Theatre in 2024) chaotic, but compared to the big, hormone-driven emotions of The Virgins, it was far “less ambiguous”, Battye says. Her primary goal with The Virgins was writing something “as complicated and chaotic as the experience of negotiating sex when you’re 16”.
The Virgins comes to Soho Theatre’s main house under the direction of Jaz Woodcock-Stewart (Paradise Now!), and reflects those frantic, fizzing teenage feelings. The action takes place in the family home of siblings Chloe (Anushka Chakravarti) and Joel (Ragevan Vasan). Chloe and her friends congregate in the bathroom, chewing each other’s ears off as they prepare for a night out where they will – fingers crossed – enter the world of sex. Growing up in a time rife with internet porn and incels, when women categorise themselves as “sluts” or “rank unloved virgins”, it’s a nerve-racking prospect
Boys, as represented by Joel and the friend he plays video games with, are a mystery to them. What isn’t so much of a mystery is the threat they might pose. Phrases like “rapey” and “SA” (a term for sexual assault used to bypass Tiktok censors) are casually dropped into conversation. By acknowledging the risks, the girls think they can avoid them. They’re making a choice, Battye says, between fearlessness and ownership or vulnerability and passivity. “It’s kind of impossible to be invulnerable, I think, as a young woman, but I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that someone might try and make themselves invulnerable,” she says.
Each respective gendered group is led by those who have had sex – the slightly older girl and boy who impart wisdom upon their young compatriots. “It’s six young people … but it’s like the non-virgins are the gods and the virgins are the subject,” Battye says. From Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum to coming-of-age classics American Pie and Juno, virginity-losing narratives have historically sat in the comedic space. Introduce even the slightest complex emotions around shame or regret, and subjects like consent come into play, undercutting the laughter. Most writers choose to avoid this: make it comedy, or full-on ancient tragedy about the rape of a virgin, but never both.
But if Strategic Love Play taught audiences anything, it’s that Battye has no interest in clear-cut narratives. The Virgins is such an affecting watch precisely because it is unafraid to ricochet between laugh-out-loud humour and utter devastation. Often, the two mingle. The tiniest comments prompt screaming matches and revelations of past trauma are flippantly tossed away.
Battye hopes audiences don’t flinch when The Virgins refuses to hold their hands and leave them with a nicely tied up lesson. “I hope it will encourage thoughtfulness, and I hope that they will experience the complication and allow that to be complicated,” she says. “I’m not trying to tell the audience how to feel about the behaviour. I’m just trying to present behaviour I believe is true.”
The Virgins runs until March 7 at Soho Theatre.
