It has been four years since Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys first premiered at London’s Royal Court in 2018. Since then it has been restaged in New York, Sydney and Brisbane. Despite this near-global reach, no iteration of this one-woman show has been able to resolve Kelly’s problematic script. This current restaging by Melbourne Theatre Company at Art Centre Melbourne’s Fairfax Studio is no different, finding itself too often ensnared by the pitfalls of its source material.

Nikki Shiels, Girls & Boys, Melbourne Theatre Company, 2022. Photo © Jeff Busby

We open with a meet-cute. An unnamed Woman (Nikki Shiels) waits in line to board an Easy Jet flight out of Naples. With boarding delayed, she soon notices an unassuming man critique a pair of women trying to push in front of him with charisma and thinly veiled misogyny. Though we are never shown that first conversation between the Woman and this defensive stranger, they are soon besotted with one another. The prototypical love story follows – marriage, a house, kids (a boy and a girl). In effect, the couple present a near perfect picture of the nuclear...