Review Roundup: What Did the Critics Think of GIRLS & BOYS at the Royal Court?

Girls & Boys, written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Lyndsey Turner runs from Thursday 8 February 2018 - Saturday 17 March 2018. Girls & Boys sees Carey Mulligan playing the role of Women, and runs in the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs. With set design by Es Devlin, costume design by Jack Galloway, lighting design by Oliver Fenwick and sound design by David McSeveney. Girls & Boys marks the first collaboration between writer Dennis Kelly and director Lyndsey Turner.

An unexpected meeting at an airport leads to an intense, passionate, head-over-heels relationship. Before long they begin to settle down, buy a house, juggle careers, have kids - theirs is an ordinary family. But then their world starts to unravel and things take a disturbing turn.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

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Marianka Swain, BroadwayWorld: Violence here is ultimately about control - particularly a male need to control, to dominate. Kelly provides a strong psychological study, but one that hits the gut as much as the brain. I've seldom felt such a sense of dread in the theatre, such a sickening worry for fictional characters.

There are times when Mulligan's narrator catches herself, struggles to continue with the same candour. We are right there with her. This is impeccably constructed theatre that feels almost unbearably real, and so very human. It sets a high bar for new writing in 2018.

Michael Billington, The Guardian: Mulligan, whose expressive features gradually acquire the stark lineaments of pain, couldn't be this good if the writing weren't strong. Kelly, lately associated with family shows such as Matilda and Pinocchio, returns to a theme that haunted much of his earlier work: the nature of violence. Here he is particularly concerned with whether it is built into the male gender's DNA. It is striking that, in the children's fantasy games, Danny is destructive and Leanne constructive. Mulligan's character finds herself working on a putative TV doc that seeks to statistically record testosterised aggression and devise a system that would make it harder for men to gain power. It is quite a leap, however, from this to the play's shattering conclusion.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: This is an extraordinary performance. [Mulligan's] work on television and film makes it easy to forget what a charismatic stage actress Mulligan is, full of understanding of the way that a flex of the neck can convey the movement of a supermodel, or a quick turn of the head suggest a heart that is broken. Bare-footed and with a south London accent, she creates a fully-rounded character, a woman surprised by her own success, gratified by her own ambition, and determined not to be destroyed by tragedy.

She gives the play the emotion its gimlet-eyed descriptions notably lack. The play is deliberately cold-hearted, and I sometimes resisted its determination to be so flatly factual. But the subtlety of Mulligan's performance pulled me along. She is supported by the accuracy and power of Kelly's writing, which is in evidence even in the gritty asides - "The terrible secret of all human endeavour might just be that it's not really that hard" - as much as in the main plot.

Dominic Cavendish, The Telegraph: If we thought Mulligan had it tough talking nineteen to the dozen, sustaining an Estuary-ish accent to boot, these interludes require another order of skill on top: miming the physical interactions with her lovably troublesome brood (never actually seen or heard). "Girls and Boys" is the title, and that's enough to spark thoughts in your head about the ramifications of these apparently innocuous scenes. To what extent are the seeds of injurious gender division sown here, in childhood "play"? Does the devil of adult professional jealousy, the squabbling contention of divorce and dangerous fragility of reason lie in the detail of our ordinary formative experience?

Alice Saville, Time Out: When it's not being hilarious, this performance can feel like a hundred wildly persuasive opinion pieces mashed together and formed into an uncannily coherent whole. Early on, there's an anecdote about a balding man elaborately getting one over on two snotty supermodels that feels precision engineered to get blokes onside for the points on gender that follow. As its analysis deepens (Mulligan's character makes documentaries, she knows how to present an argument) I found its view of gender weirdly reductive, a bit biological - can we really pin all mankind's problems on a little extra testosterone? But frustrating as I sometimes found it, I also found telling lines floating in my head for days afterwards.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: Lyndsey Turner serves it all up in an elegant production in which Mulligan lends deceptively casual aplomb to her stories of lust turning to settled love turning to potential divorce. Now and then she steps out of the mint-white box she's addressing us from at the front of the stage and into a lovely kitchen/living room in which she plays with two unseen young children. The design, by Es Devlin, is stunningly good. We see the room in full colour one second, sealed in the same mint white the next. A few colourful objects are introduced to echo the maroon slacks and muddy orange top that Mulligan is wearing. Wow.

Yet the children never take on a life of their own. Nor, really, does the unseen husband whose business gets into trouble just as Mulligan's takes off. Which means that Kelly zigs and zags too much before he gets to what is, yes, a sharp dissection of the aberrant male psyche. Serious subject, seriously good acting, but far too much time spent wondering: "Why are we being told all this?"

Paul Taylor, The Independent: It's a mouth-watering team and they do not disappoint in a piece that takes us on an extraordinary journey from clubby laughter to the bleak arctic wastes that lie on the other side of terrible tragedy. The show is jolly, then it punches you in the gut and it sends out a feminist message of shocking power. Mulligan's performance retains a moving openness through all these difficult changes of tone. At the start, she has the timing, the down-market accent, and the naughty twinkle of a stand-up comic as she regales us with her stories. She met her husband in the queue to board an easyJet flight where instant dislike for the man turned to love when he wittily saw off two beautiful, pushy models who were faking friendliness towards him just in order to cut into the line.

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Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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