It only takes one spin of the news cycle to make Dennis Kelly’s 2018 monodrama feel like something wrenched out of a headline. 

Just about everyone who saw the opening night of this revival starring Justine Clarke would have been shaken by a news story bearing chilling similarities to events described in the play. Yes, it appears to have been the far less statistically likely perpetrator in this instance, but the end result was the same; a family annihilated.

It was one of four domestic violence-related deaths in NSW alone in just over 24 hours. Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Peter McKenna said :

“I can’t remember a weekend like this in my career … It is really overwhelming.”

Justine Clarke in Girls and Boys. Photo © Sam Roberts

First seen in Sydney as part of the 2023 Sydney Festival, Girls and Boys is a gripping work of storytelling puts puts its audience in the passenger seat of a slow-motion car crash which begins with a chance meeting in a Easy-Jet queue where our unnamed narrator meets the man who will become her lover, her husband and father of her two children. It’s relatable, rear-view mirror portrait of a young woman ditching a boring job, emerging from her boozy “slaggy” years (very funny; filthy dirty) and unexpectedly finding the man of her dreams – albeit a little while before she has truly found herself. 

Harnessing her working class, zero-fucks to life to nail a junior job as an assistant in a documentary producer’s office, she starts to amass industry credits and build her profile. This is at the same time, that her husband’s business is hitting the skids.

She’s OK with carrying the extra load – kids, mortgage – but he begins to brood and drift away. He starts to seethe. They could be perfect casting for Couples Therapy, but here there’s no intervention here, no-one to challenge a man’s notion that the lives of his partner and children are his to deal with as he sees fit.

Justine Clarke in Girls and Boys. Photo © Sam Roberts

Clarke has performed this staging for several years now – it was premiered by the State Theatre Company of South Australia in 2022 (directed by Mitchell Butel, when he was Artistic Director of the company) – and she is in absolute command of its tonal shifts, steering us from the raucously comic to the breathtakingly tragic. On stage alone, she speaks for an uninterrupted hour and 50 minutes while warmly evoking both the rough-and-tumble presence of her children and the increasingly menacing shadow of her partner as she goes.

Wisely, Kelly braces his audience for the final harrowing act. It does little to cushion its impact, however. Clarke’s performance across that final 30 minutes is nothing less than shattering. 

Some critics have pointed to the fact that this is a one-sided, ‘she-said’ story. Personally, I’m OK with that in this case. Who could stomach the right of reply? Besides, in this story, Kelly stuffs the perpetrator’s mouth in the most ghastly way imaginable, ensuring we’ll never hear from him again.

Girls and Boys plays in Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 Theatre until 1 November.