The Sweethearts

It’s always tough when you realise your heroes have feet of clay. Do you remember the time Niall from One Direction got caught on camera with a cigarette and a million tweenies cried? But we sort of love it too. We’ve even got a term for it: tall poppy syndrome. But why do we do it? Sarah Page’s clunky, if well-meaning, new play tries to find out.

Girl group (and heroines to an army of teenage girls) The Sweethearts have been flown out to do a gig for heroes of a different kind at a base in Afghanistan. An insurgent attack raises uncomfortable questions of society’s misplaced idolism.

And I mean really uncomfortable. There’s a moment involving a young woman being stripped and written on that is utterly unearned. ‘The Sweethearts’ reads like a polished sitcom, it’s not a gritty realistic drama, and this ending is pure melodrama.

The beginning is great, full of energy underscored with well-observed jabs at B-list celebrity and army barrack culture. Daniel Burgess’s cast are in their element playing up to their character’s ‘traits’. Joe Claflin’s Private David Robins is ‘the poetic one’, while Jack Derges’s ‘walking erection’ Lance Corporal Mark Savy is the beefy leader of the pack.

As for the girls Sophie Stevens’s ‘I am the band’ Coco, Doireann May White’s ‘sweet but stupid’ Mari and Maria Yarjah’s ‘sexy second-string singer’ Helena perform their established roles to the hilt. Laura Hanna brings more emotional shading to Corporal Rachel Taylor and feels more complex than the rest.

‘The Sweethearts’ is full of sassy commentary on established stereotypes. But if you want to get to the bottom of why we build our heroes up only to take them down, this girl band isn’t for you.