Theatre has plenty of male antiheroes, but once you’ve ticked off Medea, Lady Macbeth and Goneril, antiheroines are in shorter supply, even in contemporary plays. But audiences may well love to hate Astrid Wentworth, the woman at the heart of Boys Will Be Boys, a new play by Melissa Bubnic with an all-female cast. It opens in a cabaret-style production at the music venue Bush Hall in west London this week.
Astrid is a hugely successful trader in the male-dominated world of banking and high finance, and very definitely a top girl. She’s the kind of woman who, when other women protest about a sexist culture, dismisses them for not having the balls to succeed. But is there a price to be paid for trying to be one of the boys?
“I really want the audience to like her, and I think they will,” says Bubnic. The cabaret framework of the play means it is threaded with songs that were performed by female icons of the 1950s and 60s including Peggy Lee, Nina Simone and Etta James – iconic women who often had to fight like hell for their success. The format allows us to see Astrid removing some of her armour and baring her soul as she performs the songs.
Bubnic is a straight-talking Australian whose best-known play, Beached, about a morbidly obese teenager, won the Patrick White Playwrights award. Since she moved to the UK to take an MA in dramatic writing, she has written for Shameless and Crackanory. “We judge women much more harshly when they behave badly because we have an assumption that they are meant to be good: motherly, kind and always looking out for each other. It’s a double standard and it’s unfair,” says Bubnic.
“Working on the play, I’ve rather fallen in love with Astrid,” says director Amy Hodge, who was interested in the script’s unusual circular structure and Brechtian devices such as all the male characters being played by women. “Astrid’s a fully rounded and deeply flawed human being. If people hate her and judge her, then either we’ve failed or they are not engaging with what the play has to say.”
“Yes,” chips in Bubnic. “I don’t agree with her politics, but there is something impressive about the way she goes out for what she wants. In some senses she is rather fabulous. She’s so completely unapologetic, and I’m constantly apologising for things that aren’t my fault at all.” She grins: “Maybe Amy and I want audiences to like Astrid because we are female.” She looks thoughtful. “I bet David Mamet didn’t go round worrying whether audiences would like the characters in Glengarry Glen Ross.”
Bubnic refers to Mamet’s play a lot when talking about Boys Will Be Boys. Its inspiration came from a conversation with Cate Blanchett at the Patrick White award ceremony when the movie star mentioned to Bubnic how she would like to see a play about how women survived in the male-dominated world of the military, particularly in the light of recent scandals including one in which two men were subsequently convicted of arranging to broadcast a sexual encounter with a female cadet over Skype.
Women, sexual double standards and consent all arise in the play and, not surprisingly, both Bubnic and Hodge think the work is particularly timely in the wake of the case of the Stanford university student, Brock Turner, who received a six-month sentence after being convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman.
“The reason I chose the world of finance rather than the armed forces was because there were more dramatic possibilities, and it’s sexier and more glamorous,” says Bubnic. “There are nicer clothes, too,” interjects Hodge. Bubnic had her research cut out, spending time researching Sex and the City to familiarise herself with the right brands. After she had finished writing, the lingering effects of the financial crash meant that no theatre wanted to touch a play about bankers and traders. “Everyone told me that nobody would sympathise with bankers or want to see them on stage because they are all arseholes,” says Bubnic. Which is why it’s taken several years to get the play staged: first in Australia last spring and now in a co-production with the Bush theatre and Headlong.
It may be set in the world of traders and dealers, but both Bubnic and Hodge are insistent that this isn’t a play about the financial world. “Nobody watches Glengarry Glen Ross and thinks it’s about real estate; they know it’s about masculinity and how your earning power is connected to how you feel about yourself as a man,” says Bubnic. “Nobody is going to see this and think, ‘Oh, now I know how a broking business works.’ But they will know the strategies a woman employs in a man’s world and ask what feminism really means. When do you think you’ve achieved real equality? Is it when you take another trader out to dinner and you slap down your Gold Amex card on the table to pay for a £600 Tuesday-night dinner that you feel really powerful? The journey Astrid goes on leaves her wondering if her choices have given her the power she thought they had. ”
Bubnic did lots of research, talking to women who worked or had worked in the city, reading about the connections between testosterone and decision-making, particularly around high-stakes traders, reading Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, and Catherine Hakim’s Honey Money: the Power of Erotic Capital, and watching Grayson Perry’s TV three-parter about masculinity, All Man.
“Astrid has used her erotic capital to get where she is,” says Hodge. “But now she is 42 and not getting any younger.” “The trouble with erotic capital,” says Bubnic, “is that it’s such a shaky foundation. Once you define yourself as tits and arse, then it’s hard to define yourself as other than that. You have a use-by date.”
Hodge thinks that the cabaret club setting and title of Boys Will Be Boys is crucial. “It cleverly plays on the idea that behaviour is learned and we are all performing. We are all playing roles, and in the case of boys it means that when they are gross and rough and sexist, we excuse it as them just being boys and think that’s alright. And it’s not.”
So are Bubnic and Hodge pleased that they work in theatre, rather than having to navigate the male-dominated world of banking? They both laugh wryly. “The perception is that, in this industry, sexism and misogyny don’t exist,” says Bubnic. “But they do. Nothing as overt as happens in the play has ever happened to me, but I’ve been in situations where I’ve felt uncomfortable or thought a man was being out of order and I didn’t say anything because my career depends on friendly working relationships, and you don’t want to be that woman who men think can’t take a joke. So we don’t speak out … and it continues.”
• Boys Will Be Boys is at Bush Hall, London, until 30 July. Box office: 020-8743 5050.
