Theatre review: Hot Chicks

Jon Gower

Grand Ambition, the Swansea-based theatre company has been around since 2021 which is long enough to see a pattern in their work. There is the energy to begin with – high octane performances are pretty much de rigeur.

Then there is the deeply rooted sense of place, in the writing, the actors and the creative team. And then their work is typified by social conscience and concern: the plays they stage shed light on real issues – opioid addiction in Richard Mylan’s ‘Sorter’ or the trials of raising a child with a disability in Tracy Harris’ ‘Mumfighter.’

Drug running

This time, in their first co-production with Cardiff’s Sherman theatre, they explore and follow county lines, those drug running routes, often linking Wales and England where school children are the mules.

Rebecca Jade Hammond’s whip-sharp script, full of tight, short lines which lend themselves to being delivered at a staccato rate, follows the misadventures of two friends, Ruby (Londiwe Mthembu ) and Kyla (Izzi McCormack-John).

They spend much of their time in a fast food joint. Here they dream zillennial dreams about TikTok fame, getting to Vegas and life being a little less shit than it currently is.

Dreams

They do much of this under the watchful and avuncular eye of the owner of Cheney’s Chicken in Swansea’s Penlan. Cheney (played with gusto by the ever warm and engaging Richard Elis) has his own sad dreams but spends much of his time looking at life through the rear-view mirror: back at the time when the shop was really successful, with chicken pieces flying out the door, or when he was bold enough to actually go to Las Vegas in the 90s, driving there from San Jose via Death Valley.

The dynamic between the central duo has all the complexities and then some.

Kyla is played as the sassier and maturer of the two, acting as a sort of surrogate mother to Ruby.

Ruby in turn is presented as woundedly vulnerable, anchorless in the world where the chicken joint is the nearest thing resembling home and Cheney the nearest she gets to fatherly care.

Manipulative

Their lives are completely altered when Sadie (Rachel Redford) walks, or rather stalks in, all burning confidence and designer gear.

Redford plays her as a callous, street-wise entrepreneur made good, who has a swagger in her step and a splinter of ice in her heart.

She’s the sort of drug dealer who doesn’t think twice about arranging for people to be beaten up or worse and is manipulative to a fault.

Much of the play is devoted to plotting Sadie’s luring of the two into a life of county lines running.

It’s near impossible not to conflate her name with “sadist” as she likes nothing more than to test the limits of her power.

In Kyla’s case she gets her to literally lick the floor, but much worse lies in wait for Ruby, who is unwittingly being groomed.

The blandishments of cash and Gucci clothes put both in danger on the streets. But when Ruby is forced to dress up for a party in a posh house in the Mumbles and go there by herself alarms bells sound.

Emotionally annihilating

Ruby’s monologue when she returns is emotionally annihilating, the stabbing lines of script telling of a life shattered by sexual assault.

‘Hot Chicks’ is directed with flair and at a fair lick by Hannah Noone, who animates the spaces in between the main scenes with pulsing dance scenes, including one of the few comedic sequences in the play when Cheney gets to do his own little number as he wipes down the tables.

Slight spoiler alert. It might have been idea to move into a slower gear after Kyla’s death, to allow the full horror of what has happened to sink in and I wasn’t convinced by the alacrity with which Cheney agrees, under threat of being labelled a paedophile, to move her body out the back.

But these are minor cavils in a play written by a supremely confident young writer and helmed by a director who makes of Hammond’s words something consistently kinetic, in a staging full of the vigour of youth and the crippling weight of its terrible disappointments and betrayals by adults.

Hats off too to the the design team – Hannah Wolfe, Katy Morison and Tic Ashfield – responsible for stage, lighting and sound, respectively, who helped create a chicken-likin set which can turn into a place of menace and dislocation as the lives of the characters in it collapse and fall apart.

Hot Chicks, like the world of deceit and broken dreams it inhabits, is about a real scourge in society but never gets at all preacherly, certainly offering plenty of food for thought for the audience to take away.

Hot Chicks finishes its at the Sherman on the 5th April and then plays at the Swansea Grand Theatre between 16-25 April 2025.

Seating in the studio at the Swansea Grand is unreserved. Choose Your Price allows audiences to select how much they’d like to pay tickets for selected performances of Hot Chicks.