Salad Days Collective produced the Queensland premiere season of UK writer Miriam Battye’s Scenes With Girls at PIP Theatre in 2024, their first year of works, and now bring it to Queensland Theatre Company as part of its DOOR 3 program and Brisbane Festival.

Founded in 2024, Salad Days Collective is now led by co-creative directors Jasmine Prasser and Georgina Sawyer. The company has quickly established itself as a force in the Brisbane scene, with a reputation for unusual, ambitious, provocative and intelligent productions with a core of absurdism or hyperrealism.

Scenes with Girls. Photo © Gracie Hosie / Karina Abbasii

Directed by Ruby Sanders, Scenes With Girls explores the complexities and contradictions of intimacy in the modern world and contemplates the distinction between romantic and platonic love. From casual sex to fervent friendships and a spectrum of emotion in between, the work explores Tosh and Lou’s relationship with each other, with themselves and with others through the character of Fran. These flawed characters allow for thematic exploration of empowerment, monogamy, sex positivity, feminism, friendship and forgiveness without moralising or offering definitive answers.

Tosh and Lou are more than best friends and housemates; they are one soul in two bodies. They talk over and interrupt one another, finish each other’s sentences, entertain and console one another, rant and cry and cackle and shriek. They are significant others and see themselves as being different from other girls, sophisticated young women pushing back against the expected narrative of love and romance.

The relationship between these two women plays out across 22 scenes, mostly confined within the walls of their shared apartment, blurring the lines of cohabitation and codependence. Love, loneliness, jealousy, distrust and reconciliation unfold; power and sympathies shift between characters in each scene as they hurl words and hurt each other.

Tosh decries relationships, expounding on the dangers and boredom of social expectations around men and monogamy. Lou wears her sexuality loudly, reducing the people she sleeps with to numbers and striving to remove her emotional and mental presence from the sex she is having. Another friend, Fran, is following the path that Tosh and Lou deride, but their opinions influence her to question whether it is what she really wants.

Scenes with Girls. Photo © Gracie Hosie / Karina Abbasii

Jasmine Prasser brings a natural cadence and unbridled emotion to the emotionally volatile character of Tosh. Hannah Ward embodies Lou with brash confidence overlaying a deep hurt. Georgina Sawyer plays sweet and well-intentioned former housemate Fran, perching awkwardly on the arm of the couch and responding to the insular chaos of the other two characters with polite interest.

Set design by Laurent Milton, built by Josh Millers, shows a cross-section of Tosh and Lou’s sharehouse, with wonky green tiles on the bathroom walls, cracking paint and water damage. The carpeted stage is ringed by piles of clothes, hairclips and other miscellaneous personal objects. On a raised platform above the living room and main stage space, characters compose themselves, take provocative photos or splash their face in the bathroom.

Lighting design by Noah Milne washes the stage in pink, flickers to transition between scenes and illuminates the private moments characters take in the bathroom. Sound design by Tommi Civili clicks through scene transitions and punctuates conversations with the ding of phone notifications.

Scenes With Girls premiered at Royal Court Theatre, London, in January 2020, and there is a playful, modern slang to the language of the script, but not to an extent that feels forced or dated. Silences and awkward turns of phrase during Fran’s visits are viscerally, artfully uncomfortable. The audience frequently enters the scene mid-conversation, dropping straight into the guts of an argument, a confession or a diatribe, which maintains a strong sense of momentum across a disjointed timeline.

Delivered with authentic emotion and a deep sense of recognition, Scenes With Girls maps the shifting tectonic plates of formative female friendships with care and complexity.

Scenes With Girls plays at the Diane Cilento Studio until 19 September. A Brisbane Festival event.