“It’s a really, really tough play for the audience,” admits Dennis Kelly. Girls and Boys, which opened at London’s Royal Court this month, boasts an astonishing solo performance from Carey Mulligan as an unnamed working-class woman who blags her way into the film industry, gets married and has two children. She and her husband build a life together, but it starts to crumble and is then brutally destroyed.
“There are only two characters in this play: the actor and the audience,” says Kelly. “You risk running the audience out of the play when it gets hard.” The going gets very hard indeed, and anyone who has tickets for the sold-out hit may not want to read any further. As Kelly says: “You can’t talk about the play without giving away what’s going on.” But he thinks we do need to talk about it – and it’s his job to do it.
“Writers are weird. We are always working, we plunder our own relationships so lots of people can come and take a peek. If you’ve got any hope of writing anything good, what you have to do is put a secret in what you are writing. Sometimes a few. The secrets don’t have to be profound, it’s not like you are telling people that you killed someone as a child. What you are doing is saying, ‘This is what I think’, and it is almost always something that you don’t tell your friends, family or partner. But you do put it in a play for a whole bunch of strangers to come and have a look at. Or in a TV series for a million people to see.”
Kelly began work on Girls and Boys over two years ago in Naples airport while waiting, like the character in his play, for a flight. The play wasn’t commissioned by a theatre, but was something that Kelly felt compelled to write after wondering about the origins and effects of male violence. He sent the first draft to director Lyndsey Turner, and they developed it together before taking it to the Royal Court.
There has always been a dark side to Kelly’s work, from his 2003 debut, Debris, which featured a DIY crucifixion, through to DNA (about teenagers killing a classmate) to Channel 4’s brutally explicit thriller Utopia. Even his family shows, Matilda and Pinocchio, have baleful undertones. In Girls and Boys, he considers the unthinkable: family annihilation. “It’s such an incomprehensible act, it makes no sense to wipe out the people you love or once loved deeply. But people do it, mostly men, and it’s on the rise.”
Kelly says he has never been violent “but only because I’m not good at it. I have never been a tough guy, but there is probably somewhere inside me part of me who would like to murder someone. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t fantasise about violence, in fact it makes me a bit sick, but I reckon there is a version of me in an alternative universe who enjoys it. Lots of men do. There is something in men that leans towards violence, and upbringing and awareness are the antidotes.”
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.
When Kelly first met Mulligan to talk about the role, he was taken aback to realise she was heavily pregnant. “I said to her that I was shocked she had been OK to read the play. But she was fine. I love Carey’s physicality. The way she picks up Danny and cradles him. Like the character, she’s a working mum with two kids and you see a working mum’s love, patience, irritation and guilt. I don’t think it terrifies her doing the play; she manages not to let it become her.”
There is a line in Girls and Boys when Mulligan’s character reflects: “We didn’t create society for men, we created it to stop men.” What is it about men that means over 90% of murders are committed by them? “I’m not a fan of the phrase ‘toxic masculinity’,” says Kelly. “Men need masculinity and women need femininity. But there are men out there for whom asserting their masculinity means being unable to fail or bend but only to break.” Kelly believes it comes from a fear he recognises in his younger self.
“Up until my 30s, when I sorted myself out, I was terrified of admitting fear, but I was a very fearful person. You have to get past that, and when you do it brings a power, but lots of men don’t and never see past all the bullshit of the John Wayne myth.” He thinks that’s the case of the unseen and unnamed husband in Girls and Boys. “He would probably think of himself as pretty liberal man. Even a feminist. But when push comes to shove he isn’t, he cannot have a woman being better than him. I wanted to make them sympathetic and understandable as a couple. I didn’t want us to be able to [blame] her. He was one of those men with a time bomb waiting to go off inside him.”
In early drafts, Kelly thought of the play as a gender-inverted Medea but says that Mulligan’s character “deserves her own play, more than just a riff on a Greek play”. He adds that the play is not about the husband. “It’s about her. There is another play about him,” he says, joking that it could be a sequel called Boys and Girls. He is unapologetic for giving this woman centre stage.
“Lyndsey said something great about the character. She said she would fucking hate to be in this play. There is another version of this play where she is broken from the beginning and this is the opposite of that. The annihilation only happens in the final fifth of the play. We see that she is a woman with a lot of life, a woman with a voice. I really love her.”
The play was finished long before the Weinstein scandal broke, and Kelly hasn’t changed anything in response, but he sees the sexual harassment of women as part of the same problem of patriarchy and male violence. “Early drafts were much more didactic, and there were loads of statistics about sexual assault, which is about one in five women. If that happened to men it would be something we would sort out, but we don’t. For years we’ve gone, ‘Oh that’s just the way the world is, and men behave badly.’ We often don’t even talk about it. It’s just been part of the wallpaper. Maybe as a result of Weinstein and #MeToo we are at last looking at the wallpaper, and going, ‘That’s enough.’”
- Girls and Boys is at the Royal Court, London, until 17 March. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
