Freak, Theatre 503

Anna Jordan's new play comes to London after gathering quite a following at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.

‘I don’t believe in writing plays without humour and hope’, says Anna Jordan, writer of ‘Freak’, which has come straight to us from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. ‘Freak’ is a new sex-fuelled play about young women whose driven sexualities place them as rebels against society. We can expect to be taken on a whirlwind ride by a play that moves from warmth and wit to the uncomfortably wretched. 

‘Freak’ was the word on everybody’s lips when we visited the Edinburgh Fringe, and A Younger Theatre described the production as ‘capturing the Lambrini-soaked malaise of youth with rare precision’. We’ve already noticed a new literary trend of bad girl heroines who are reacting against the idea that to be a powerful women is to be perfectly in control. Instead they are, as Eat my Heart Out author Zoe Pilger put it in her conversation with Culture Whisper, ‘failing at being a woman to achieve a kind of freedom.’ We’re glad that this production shows women across the arts are taking their turn to glorify callous hedonism.

Anna Jordan was the winner of the Bruntwood Prize 2013 with her play ‘Yen’: a story about how environment defines us, inspired by a real life event Jordan read about in a local paper in which two boys, too young to have developed into into fully fledged personalities, commit an unthinkable murder. Her previous plays have had runs at the Bush Theatre and the Soho Theatre, and her writing has been described by The Observer as “Unflinching … laugh out loud funny”. If her recent successes are anything to go by, this will be an production that invigorates and leaves you the audience with plenty to think about.

To give you a flavour of the delicious inventiveness and clarity of Jordan’s writing (and also of the graphic and sexually explicit adult content), click here to download Freak’s opening monologue.

We have also previewed her production of Chicken Shop, also hot from the Fringe and playing over the same dates, over at The Park Theatre.