There have been many terrific solo female plays, and many of them performed at Melbourne Theatre Company over the years. Amanda Muggleton was an irrepressible Shirley Valentine in the old Russell St theatre; Robyn Nevin tore up the boards as Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking; and next year Sheridan Harbridge brings her celebrated performance in Prima Facie and Judith Lucy turns to Beckett’s masterpiece and ostensible monologue, Happy Days. In the meantime, we have to be content with UK playwright Dennis Kelly’s less stellar effort, Girls & Boys.
Like Prima Facie, this play seems ripped from the headlines, and benefits from our awareness that these things are happening all around us, and do indeed speak to contemporary concerns. But unlike Suzie Miller’s searing portrait of sexual injustice in the legal system, Girls & Boys feels decidedly academic, like a Ted Talk from someone who’s merely read about the issue in the morning paper. There’s no sense that Kelly has any skin in the game. Nikki Shiels is one of the country’s most exciting actors, but even she feels emotionally remote here.
The character she plays has no name, and neither does the husband who provides the play’s animus and is the key to a tragedy the playwright keeps far too long in reserve. In fact, the only people who are named – apart from a brief moment of inattention where the name of the protagonist’s boss is dropped – are the couple’s two children, Leanne and Danny. This ambivalence around specificity and generalisation feels for a while like it might become thematically significant, but then Kelly fails to make much of it.
The play has an intriguing dramatic structure, with long sections of confessional delivered directly to the audience broken by arrhythmic scenes of domestic banter with the children. Shiels mimes her interactions with her unseen kids, hugging them to her, holding their hands, leading them around the stage. It is only when, halfway into the play, she turns to us and explains that they’re not really there, that she is only pretending to interact with them as some kind of psychological balm, that we realise we’re in the midst of unspeakable tragedy. It is an abrupt, and oddly anti-climactic, lurch into pathos.
From there, the play moves inexorably towards its gruesome climax, but even here Kelly seems strangely reticent, as if protecting the audience from the emotional impact even while coldly laying out every grisly detail. When we arrive at the central incident, the protagonist delivers a kind of preamble: ‘Remember, this didn’t happen to you. And this isn’t happening now.’ It’s bizarre, as if the playwright wants to wrap his audience in cotton wool. Given this is a work of fiction, why didn’t he go all the way and have her say: ‘This didn’t happen at all because I’m completely made up’?
Shiels is such a commanding presence on stage, and has such control over the material (her mastery of vocal modulation, that ability to alter her vocal register to hit narrative beats, is so astonishing other actors should study it) that she makes the play seem better than it is. There is a sanguine quality to her that is refreshing in this context, but Kelly’s tendency to circumnavigate the story’s emotional nucleus does her no favours, and ultimately the play just isn’t poignant enough for the material.
Director Kate Champion works hard to keep the overlong monologue compelling, even while she gives Shiels the space to comfortably inhabit its longueurs. She steers the play away from any charges of prurience, but this tends to highlight its lack of dramatic immediacy. Marg Howell’s set, boringly lit by Amelia Lever-Davidson, is a quotidian hodgepodge, too large for intimacy and too dull for poeticism. Romanie Harper’s video additions feel awfully underdone after the astonishing challenges Shiels has recently navigated in Picture of Dorian Gray.
There are some genuinely intriguing things going on in Girls & Boys – a moment when the protagonist almost mentions her parents, before telling us ‘I don’t want to talk about that’, suggests blindspots unacknowledged – and it flirts with the kind of ambivalence about true crime that made John Darnielle’s recent novel Devil House so fascinating. But it pulls its punches; it’s never quite as devastating as it thinks it is. Shiels is very good, but this won’t go down as a solo masterpiece. We’ll have to wait till next year for another of those.
Girls & Boys plays until November 26, 2022. Get your tickets here.
