Theatre

Review

Review: Good Girl at Trafalgar Studios

Naomi Sheldon’s exceptional debut comes to the London’s West End

Find tickets here

Following an acclaimed run at Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Naomi Shledon’s Good Girl has now transferred to London’s West End. Winner of Voice’s Pick of the Fringe Award 2017, this stunning one-woman show is a testament to the power of femininity and a joyful celebration of life.

Growing up in the 1990s, GG and her mates obsess over music, vaginas and witchcraft. But there’s a problem. Living feels too extreme. To be one of the good girls, GG learns to make herself numb, but at what cost? “One of these days, am I going to evaporate? Right here?”

This is a bold production, told through short monologues that perfectly capture the feelings of uncertainly that shroud our adolescence; snapshots of stolen teenage moments blur with present day musings about just how things ended up this way– the whole thing is perfectly pitched, provocative and brutally honest.

There are moments of sheer glee and laugh-out-loud hilarity – Sheldon is exceptionally good at bottling teenage emotions into a few short, pithy sentences – but at its core, Good Girl is a darkly comic coming of age tale that deals with some pretty powerful themes: self-acceptance, rape culture, the intensity of growing up different from everyone else.

Good Girl hits hardest when it’s at its most personal. But, inexplicably, GG’s experiences morph into collective ones, so it doesn’t matter if you were born decades before or after the protagonist – you recognise the picture she paints as something personal to you.

The overall effect is an insightful, authentic and giving piece of immersive theatre – no mean feat for a one-woman show, a single spotlight and a barren, chipboard set.

Sure, Good Girl adds a new perspective to the current dialogue about the female experience, and it’s a much needed one – honest as it is – but ultimately this is a show that’s a celebration of simply being alive and is well worth investigating.


Good Girl runs at Trafalgar Studio 2 until 31 March 2018. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster.co.uk

Photo by: Felicity Crawshaw