An Ode to Female Friendships: Courtney Büchner’s One of the Girls

★★★★

Marriage is supposed to be forever. Friendship, Courtney Büchner suggests, is afforded rather less certainty. In an incredibly lively hour, visual aids and all, Büchner walks her audience through what she identifies (dubiously) as the five stages of friendship: penetration, small talk, deepening of bonds, plateau and, eventually, de-penetration. Friendship here is not so much cyclical as linear; a clear trajectory with a potential end in sight.

As Büchner traces these stages through her own relationships, she begins spotting them between herself and members of the audience, too, with one ambitious goal: by the end of the hour, the room should be full of friends. 

At its core, the set is an ode to female friendship and the particular romanticism that exists in bonds between women, especially, apparently, when they sing karaoke together.

Büchner recalls the moment she and her childhood bestfriend, Stella, wrote Audre Lorde’s quotation on her bedroom wall: "Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me." Her mother’s rather less sentimental response — “Fuck! I’m trying to sell the house!”— gets the laugh, but the image becomes unexpectedly poignant. Writing, or some form of mark, quite literally remains regardless of whether the friendship that produced it has changed.

The narrative itself begins to falter as Büchner suddenly reveals the distance that has grown between her and Stella. After building their friendship into the emotional centre of the hour, its deterioration arrives almost as a curveball, without quite enough space to interrogate what changed.

Yet there is something strangely appropriate about that absence of explanation. Friendships rarely end with the clean finality afforded to romantic break-ups; they fizzle, quietly and often without either person naming what has happened. As Büchner puts it, in 2026 we don’t necessarily lose friends. Instead, we become followers, lurking at the edges of each other’s lives on Instagram.

Regardless of the narrative’s occasional looseness, it is Büchner’s crowd work that really animates the hour. Her ability to move from scripted storytelling into spontaneous riffing is striking; conversations with audience members don’t feel like interruptions to the set but extensions of it. For a show preoccupied with the mechanics of making friends, that ease with strangers feels particularly apt.

Eilidh Paterson

Dylan Woodley