Award-winning writer and performer Helena Fox will debut her new one-woman play, Tectonic Plates, at The Chelsea Theatre on 25 August.

The stage is bare apart from a lone desk, a PowerPoint presentation, and a large, obnoxiously ticking clock. The lesson is about to start. 

The screen and stage have long capitalised on the fruitful ground of teenage school days, from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Sex Education. Tectonic Plates takes this genre and skews it, setting the action in real time over the course of one lesson, and giving voice to only one character: GIRL. 

Universally relatable and amusingly specific all at once, Tectonic Plates uncovers the simultaneous hilarity and trauma of trying to survive school when the cracks are starting to show. GIRL isn’t very well, and isn’t very straight, but she hasn’t really realised either yet. Before the curtain falls, the audience gets a glimpse of GIRL’s future, and what lessons she has taken with her - or tried to leave behind. Discussion is rife about how children should ‘catch up’ from the time missed while schools have been closed. Tectonic Plates poses the question, what of school is worth catching up on? 

Helena Fox is the creator and co-writer of the award-winning, five-star Edinburgh Fringe hit Rust the Musical. She came second at Man Up! 2019, and has also worked with the Winchester Playmakers and The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. The Grad Fest was founded in May 2020 by Liam Gartland and Alice Croft (Tectonic Plates director, ArtsEd 2020) during the height of the pandemic, to support recent theatre graduates. They continue to produce a vast and diverse body of work. 

Tickets are available on a ‘pay what you want’ basis here.