Review: Girls & Boys at Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company
Review by Carly Fisher
Sydney Theatre Company’s Girls & Boys is one of those productions where my admiration for the work on stage ultimately exceeded my response to the play itself - which based on the premise of the show alone, was a response I wasn't expecting.
Let's start with the show's greatest accomplishment - its casting. Justine Clarke is a tour de force. She delivers a beautifully natural performance with exceptional accent work and phenomenal timing throughout. What makes her performance so compelling is how little she appears to be trying to make us feel about this woman. She is funny, rough around the edges and decidedly real. Clarke, supported by Mitchell Butel’s direction, trusts the audience to make up its own mind about her. She is allowed to simply exist in all her contradictions, and that naturalism makes the performance particularly effective.
It is an extraordinarily demanding role, requiring Clarke to hold the stage alone for an hour and fifty minutes without an interval while maintaining the energy, pace and enthusiasm of a character recounting her own life. That she can do so without the performance feeling laboured at all is testament to her skill, as is how gracefully she is navigates the audience through this script.
Mitchell Butel’s direction is similarly confident. There is a clarity to the production that never feels overworked, and a willingness to allow the audience to sit with the protagonist rather than constantly telling us what to think about her. That restraint is one of the production’s strengths.
The set, designed by Ailsa Paterson, is beautiful in its simplicity. It is cleverly nondescript, shifting enough to accommodate the different locations within the protagonist’s story without ever becoming a literal recreation of them. Furthermore, the set offers an ambiguity that in many ways makes it feel like a kind of undefined waiting room — a space in which this woman is waiting for change, waiting for something to be different, waiting for her life to move somewhere else. Whether intentional or not, it becomes an evocative physical backdrop for a story concerned so heavily with waiting for circumstances to change.
The costume was less of a success - it was giving Hawaiian shirt vibes and was just an unflattering choice with no real need for it to be something quite so bold.
Butel employs mime throughout a number of scenes which initially felt slightly at odds with the otherwise naturalistic performance. As the play progressed, however, the eventual explanation for this theatrical device encouraged me to reconsider those earlier moments and what initially felt like an affectation, resolved to be something quite beautiful. I appreciated the production more for having trusted us to reassess this trope rather than immediately explaining its purpose.
My greater reservation is with Dennis Kelly’s script.
Girls & Boys has an undeniably compelling premise and explores deeply important territory, but I found its trajectory increasingly predictable. I wanted to be shocked by where the story took me, and instead I often found myself several steps ahead of it. The gradual shift from an apparently ordinary life towards something much darker is carefully constructed, but for me the construction became visible well before the destination arrived.
That sense of predictability was compounded by the running time. At one hour and fifty minutes without an interval, the production asks a considerable amount of its audience. There is, interestingly, what feels like a natural point within the script where an interval could have fallen if the intention was to retain the material in its entirety. But I also couldn't help feeling that the sharper solution would have been to cut. Several ideas and beats are repeated, and some of the groundwork for the eventual revelations is laid perhaps a little too carefully. A tighter script would, I suspect, have made the material considerably more cutting and the eventual impact considerably stronger.
That is ultimately a criticism of the writing rather than the production. Clarke proves she can hold an audience for the duration, and maintain the rhythm of this character for an extraordinary length of time. And perhaps that is why I came away feeling conflicted. There is so much to admire in this production. Clarke really is exceptional in this. Butel’s direction is intelligent and restrained. The design is elegant and increasingly meaningful, and the production rewards the audience for paying close attention.
I just wanted to like it more than I did.
More specifically, I wanted to be more shocked by it than I was.
The subject matter is confronting, and the questions around misogyny, domestic violence and the ways we understand the people closest to us remain deeply relevant. But by the time Girls & Boys reached its darkest territory, I was already expecting it. Overall, it's an excellent production of a play that I wanted to find more surprising.
