In 2012 Shabir Ahmed, the ringleader of the Rochdale grooming gang operating in Greater Manchester, was sentenced to 22 years for multiple child sexual offences and rape. Phil Davies wrote Firebird three years later and it debuted at the Hampstead Theatre Downstairs in September 2015, transferring to Trafalgar Studios in February 2016. Shabir Ahmed was released on licence on 2 July 2026, after serving only 14 years. Firebird was revived on 9 July for only a month.

If our Prime Minister, a former Director of Public Prosecutions, could tell the country that we should all watch Adolescence, perhaps our new Prime Minister from Manchester should make Firebird mandatory viewing. It is a gut-wrenching performance, powerful enough to draw tears from a stone. However, because it is playing at Southwark Playhouse Borough, on the fringes of London’s mainstream theatre scene, it has not received the level of review coverage, and consequently the visibility, that it deserves. It is raw, it is rough around the edges, and it turns you inside out.

And unlike Adolescence, it is not fiction. Davies comes from Rochdale and wrote the play wondering which of the girls he had gone to school with would have been affected. This play is not simply a retelling of what happened; it is an illustration of how it happened and why the girls never stood a chance. It shows, in a matter of moments, how grooming works.

Tia’s bluster cannot hide the low self-esteem that sits beneath almost everything she does. Her vulnerability does not attract support; it attracts predators. She just wants to be loved. They just want to exploit her. Tia is not groomed because she is stupid. She is groomed because she is susceptible. Because she is desperate for affection. Because the people who should be keeping her safe are absent, indifferent or incompetent.

For this play to have full impact, you cannot cast colour-blind. You have to cast a skinny white actress and a well-built brown man. It won’t work otherwise. And Mollie Milne is perfect as Tia. Her tiny, frail body seems to vibrate with anxiety: the twitching, the bouncing off the walls, the leg that never quite stops shaking. The sparse, black stage design is a perfect illustration of Tia’s life, devoid of warmth, love or anything beautiful she can call her own. She is so desperate for kindness and human connection that it feels as though she has been raised in solitary confinement. The cold strobe lighting. The ceiling descending as if the world is closing in around her. The audience becomes trapped alongside her. Her panic becomes ours.

It is genius that the police officer is played by the same person as the abuser. Hard to tell the difference between those meant to protect her and those set on exploiting her. Hard to tell who is more despicable: the man who imprisons her and manipulates her into being gang raped, or the police officer who sends her straight back into that captivity. She really has no one in her corner.

Watching what happens to Tia is eviscerating. Part of you keeps looking for a way to soften it because the alternative is simply too much to bear. Which is why it is genius that Tia isn’t necessarily a likeable character. She is mouthy. She is rude. She swears, begs and smokes. All of this makes it easy to forget that she is only fourteen, easy to see her as older than she is, perhaps even partially complicit in her own fate.

But it is when Tia and Katie start discussing sleepovers that I can no longer hold back the tears. My daughter will be turning fourteen in a matter of days and that is exactly the sort of conversation she has with her friends. An ordinary exchange between two girls enjoying the possibilities of childhood.

Tia never stood a chance.

Privilege now has a new meaning to me. Privilege is a family that loves you.