Girls and Boys review – a devastating portrait of motherhood, marriage and violence

The Guardian

14-02-2025

This production of Dennis Kelly's one-woman play begins a little like a Netflix special. Barefoot in front of a blank backdrop, our protagonist, played by Aisling Loftus, recounts how she found love in an easyJet queue. Punchlines are delivered with the aplomb of a Palladium standup: Paris is 'like Leeds with wide streets'. Insults – 'lard-synapsed cockhead' – are as artful as they are crude. A recollection of her 'slaggy' years includes a detail so gross-out she instantly repeats it.
We listen as she builds a dream career as a documentary film-maker, her confidence inspired by her new husband. But even as we're falling for her candour and chutzpah, Kelly is casting shadows that haunt and lengthen. The trace elements of the writer's dark vein – as seen in his brilliantly disturbing TV series Utopia – are present even in his character's most triumphant moments.
Between sections of the monologue, Loftus acts out scenes of motherhood in designer Janet Bird's peachy open kitchen; an ominous crackle accompanies the transitions between the two. We can't see the children, but an aching combination of tenderness and frustration renders them perfectly – too-clever Leanne, fashioning London's Shard skyscraper out of mud, and boisterous Danny determined to cluster-bomb it. Their father's absence is increasingly noticeable.
Anna Ledwich's direction doesn't overdo the unease; it's always there, waiting, in the corner of your eye. Seven years ago, Carey Mulligan debuted this role and Loftus's performance surely deserves just as much attention. She is so winning and relatable that it's only later you clutch at your stomach and notice you have been silently, surgically eviscerated.
'I think a lot about violence,' she says at one point. 'It's such a fundamental part of our species. How can you understand us if you don't understand it?' The answers this play offers are not meant to be definitive (when it was first produced at the Royal Court, some found its discussion of gender-based aggression too one-sided). But as an evocation of the human heart's insidious capacities, it is devastating.
At Nottingham Playhouse until 1 March