23/08/26

Pleasance Courtyard (Baby Grand), Edinburgh

Parker (Rachael DeBoer) and Ava (Shaylaren Hilton) are besties, hanging out in Parker’s bedroom, studying and painting their toe nails. So far, so ordinary. But it soon transpires that this is a school day and that they’re home because something terrible has happened…

One of their classmates brought a gun to their physics lesson yesterday, planning a massacre.

The girls are in shock.

But they don’t feel entitled to their trauma because, while their shooter was stopped before he hurt anyone, another incident across town led to thirteen teenage deaths. Social media is full of sympathy for the students of the other school. Meanwhile, no one’s even acknowledging that anything happened to Parker and Ava.

Parker’s on board with that. She just wants to forget it ever happened, to bury herself in physics revision and try to get the GPA she needs for a college scholarship. Ava, on the other hand, is furious. How dare people brush their experience under the carpet? Of course she’s glad that no one she knows died but that doesn’t make everything okay. She’s been through something terrifying and she wants to effect change.

She wants to mount a challenge to the NRA, to gun laws, to late-stage capitalism and selfish billionaires.

But all she’s got is a TikTok account, some headed notepaper and a purple Sharpie. It’s not exactly a fair fight. How is a schoolgirl to make her voice heard?

Written by Alice Stanley Jr and directed by Riley Rose Critchlow, The Second Best School Shooting offers a rare insight into the effects of gun violence on teenage survivors, whose emotional landscape is shaped by the ever-present background fear that they could be shot at. Anywhere. The script is sharp and snappy, creating a believable dynamic between the friends, and confronting the audience with some uncomfortable truths about the world we’ve created for our young people.

DeBoer and Hilton are perfectly cast as the contrasting central duo, DeBoer skilfully capturing Parker’s outward calm as well as her internal struggle, while Hilton cleverly allows Ava’s high-octane performance to slip, revealing the panic she’s struggling to control.

Developed alongside March for Our Lives, the political group formed by students who were in the 2018 Parkland tragedy, The Second Best School Shooting is an urgent, important piece of theatre. I urge you to see it.

4.2 stars

Susan Singfield