It's a very odd sensation, reviewing a play that is already sold out. Usually you are invited to write a review in the hope that what you say might encourage people to buy tickets. In this case, I feel like my job is more about telling people who already have tickets how lucky they are.And boy, how lucky they are.
Girls and Boys, which premiered at The Royal Court Theatre this week, is a new play by Dennis Kelly. Kelly is perhaps most famous as the co-writer of Matilda the Musical, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. However, Girls and Boys is strictly for grown-ups.
The play is a monologue performed by Carey Mulligan, who I dare say sold a fair proportion of the tickets on name alone and I’m pleased to say, rightly so.
Charting the course of a relationship from beginning to end, Girls and Boys is a combination of what are accurately referred to in the script as ‘chats’ and ‘scenes’. For the majority of the play, Mulligan speaks directly with the audience, much as if she is talking to a friend. This is interspersed with scenes of her with her children. There are no children on stage, but through Kelly’s beautifully observant words and Mulligan’s unwavering commitment, there really could be.
The play is about men and women, their differences and how these manifest in the relationships between them. The one hour and thirty minutes fliy past. Similar to a rollercoaster that has kept you waiting in line for what felt like an eternity, it swoops you up and down, turns you inside out and spits you back onto the street before you’ve even realised the ride has started. It’s playful and poignant and the ending is not for the faint-hearted.
The production is further buoyed by a stellar creative team. Lyndsey Turner’s direction is note perfect and anyone familiar with Es Devlin’s work will be unsurprised at how beautiful her set is.
One hopes that, like much of the work that originates at The Royal Court, there will be life for Girls and Boys after it’s initial run. It deserves to be seen by a wider audience.
Eugene O’Neill completed Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1941, but such was his apparent shame at having produced this dramatic dissection and evisceration of a fictional Irish-American family, that he submitted it with the instruction that it was not to be published until 25 years after his death, and was on no account ever to be performed on a stage.