Girls & Boys (Oberon Modern Plays): A Play

Product Information

Look, I think I probably was at one stage,” Kelly says. “I think a lot of people could [have been]. I was a f***ing weird little kid who couldn’t connect with people. I just found alcohol and that sort of got me through.” She meets him in an airport queue and sparks fly. Their passionate love affair takes them to marriage, a mortgage, and children – an ordinary family life. Her natural working-class wit works to her advantage, and she unexpectedly starts rising above her allotted rung on the British social I wrote it before having Kezia and I know I wouldn’t be able to write it now,” Kelly says. “That doesn’t mean I’m not glad I wrote it, but I couldn’t face it now.”

It is clear Kelly fervently believes in mankind despite the violence we’re capable of. He readily agrees. “There’s a tendency to think we’re awful,” he says. “When you watch Planet of the Apes nowadays the apes are the heroes because everyone thinks humans are f---ing awful. Avatar’s the same. But maybe if cows had intelligence they would have invented the internal combustion engine and messed up the climate.

Subscribe to Breaking News.

He feels the same way about the heart-stopping school massacre in the Channel 4 drama Utopia, which ran for two series between 2013-14, and was reworked with an American slant by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn for Prime Video in 2020. The first episode aired just weeks after the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in the US, in which 20 children and six members of staff were killed. “There’s no way I’d write that now, I just think it would be irresponsible.”

For the playwright, the act of murdering a family was a lens through which to examine the darker aspects of masculinity, a topic that in 2016 was on the cusp of being crystallised as a social movement. In one of the play’s key moments, the narrator posits the idea that “We didn’t create society for men, we created it to stop men.”

Single Ticket Prices

This is a weird thing. It starts off really nice and light and, since both Kelly and Mulligan are Brits, has a sort of distinctive Richard Curtis (of "Notting Hill" and "Love Actually" fame) thing about it. The origins of the play are twofold. First, his ex-wife, Italian actor Monica Nappo, had asked him to write her a monologue and second, he heard the phrase “family annihilator” and couldn’t get it out of his head. “It’s such an awful thing,” he says. “The phrase feels so dark it almost doesn’t belong in this world.” Girls & Boys marks the first collaboration between writer Dennis Kelly and director Lyndsey Turner. In Girls and Boys, the woman’s daughter, Leanne, spends her time painstakingly creating objects, such as a Shard made out of mud, while her young son, Danny, runs around destroying his sister’s structures. One of the quiet, unassuming pleasures of the evening is watching Mulligan’s character trying to teach her children with all the unsung heroism that requires. There’s all this stuff about comedians – some people think they’re free to say everything, some comedians say they’re not free. Who gives a f*** what comedians say? Why do we care? It’s what real people say.”