SISTREN: A Loud, Loving, Unfiltered Ode To Sisterhood

A chaotic, meme-soaked ode to girlhood and the ferocity of loving your best friend, SISTREN  turns a “lethal combination” into something tender, volatile and entirely its own.

Staged by Griffin Theatre Company, Iolanthe’s playwriting debut stars her opposite Janet Anderson as Isla and Violet—two girls whose bond feels cosmic, unbreakable, and just a little bit dangerous.

Too smart, too loud, too inseparable, Isla and Violet are forcibly split by their self-righteous headmaster, a decision that sets the play’s emotional engine in motion. The separation isn’t just disciplinary; it becomes existential. Stripped of their shared orbit, both are left fighting to be seen—by each other, by their school, by a world that insists on ranking their struggles rather than recognising their overlap.

The question isn’t simply whether they’ll reunite, but whether their bond can withstand distance, ego and the quiet fractures of growing up.

SISTREN’s writing thrives in this push and pull. It’s unapologetically Gen Z—littered with TikTok audios, impressions and deep-cut memes that feel pulled straight from the chat.

Anderson opens with a cheeky lip-sync to Are You Havin’ Any Fun?, setting the tone for a show that is playful, self-aware and just a little bit chaotic. Elsewhere, recognisable bits—“gahdamn!” punctuations, loving nods to Tiffany Pollard—land with precision rather than feeling like a hollow collage.

The humour is irreverent but controlled, skirting absurdity before pulling back into moments of real sincerity.

That control is what allows the play to hit harder when it needs to. A standout monologue from Iolanthe, reflecting on Isla’s father’s imprisonment, cuts clean through the noise—suddenly grounding the show in something raw and deeply felt.

Iolanthe also threads in a sharp, lived-in sense of intersectional feminism, not as a slogan but as friction. Isla and Violet circle the question of who “has it harder,” their arguments exposing fault lines between communities that, as the play insists, have always been interconnected. It’s messy, unresolved, and all the more convincing for it.

Performance is where the show becomes electric. Iolanthe and Anderson share a chemistry that feels almost intrusive in its authenticity—less like watching actors, more like eavesdropping on devastating tea.

Their dynamic moves at speed, snapping from petty arguments to silly soundbites, sometimes within the same breath.

Anderson’s comic timing is razor-sharp, while both performers lean fully into contrast, creating a rhythm that carries the show even as it resists clean structure.

And it does resist it. The narrative stacks ideas, images and tonal shifts rather than building to a neat arc; at times, that diffuseness blunts the emotional payoff, with threads introduced and abandoned just as quickly. And yet, the show largely gets away with it. Every leap is tethered to Isla and Violet’s gravitational pull towards each other, a connection strong enough to hold even its messiest impulses together.

Visually, the production mirrors that heightened sensibility. A fuzzy pink classroom—tufted desks, furry walls—renders the stage as a kind of warped dollhouse, playful but faintly suffocating.

It’s a pointed image: the girls are both performers and objects, echoing the play’s quieter interrogation of how Black femininity is aestheticised, contained and projected onto. Dreamy lighting and sudden isolating spotlights punctuate the action, swinging between melodrama and absurdity with ease.

SISTREN is for anyone who has ever had a friendship that felt all-consuming, especially one that ended, or maybe almost did. Gen Z audiences fluent in doom scrolling and women of all ages will feel instantly at home, but its emotional core cuts wider.

It’s as funny as it is cutting, as chaotic as it is sincere.

In centring a friendship that is both fiercely messy and loving, the play resists easy narratives of rupture or rivalry. Instead, it insists on something harder: listening, accountability, and the ongoing effort of staying connected.

Bold, specific and unwilling to tidy itself up, SISTREN is exactly the kind of story theatre needs more of.

SISTREN is running till 3 May at Belvoir St Theatre.