★★★★☆
Sydney Theatre Company’s Girls & Boys creates an illusion of safety and comfort, then takes it apart, piece by piece. Justine Clarke has the audience spellbound in Dennis Kelly’s one-woman play, now back at Wharf 1 Theatre, lulling us in with amusing anecdotes before revealing something far darker.
The opening scene feels like sitting in a pub while a particularly garrulous friend holds the floor with hilarious travel stories. Clarke bursts onto the stage in bright yellow trousers and a big grin, almost clown-like. She proceeds to launch into travel anecdotes and observations about people holding up queues at airports that all seem quite tame at first, before graphic sexual descriptions surprise the audience.
The way vulgarities fall out of her mouth, against the shiny Play School-like backdrop, is a jarring juxtaposition that’s both hilarious and awkward. It’s a clever, unique set-up for a story that shifts between comedy and documentary-like, deadpan delivery, while something bubbles under the surface. The effect is strangely hypnotic.
First staged by director Mitchell Butel with State Theatre Company South Australia for the 2022 Adelaide Festival, the play oscillates between monologues to the audience and scenes in the home, where the Woman (Justine Clarke) plays with and mothers her two invisible children, a boy and a girl.
Her stories move from hilarious social observations when travelling to her raucous youth, to first meeting her husband, raising a family and the cut-throat world of the film industry. Kelly’s script is rich with clever, highly evocative lines, such as “It was like a thought wandering into your mouth without permission.”
The essential brilliance in Butel’s direction lies in the use of space, casting, and stage iconography. Casting Justine Clarke, a beloved anchor of Australia’s childhood for two decades on Play School, is a stroke of genius.
This, together with Ailsa Paterson’s stunning set design, creates an unsettling juxtaposition between a sense of buoyancy and safety and an eerie emotional undercurrent, one that lingers below Clarke’s grin.
The shiny, pristine, Play School-like stage is replete with skeletal window frames and simple, colourful set pieces. Clarke appears stranded amidst a hollow, uncanny valley-like space, a bit Truman Show, a bit Pleasantville. She’s given the entire space to play with, alone, much like her work on Play School.
Writer Dennis Kelly uses the woman’s profession as a documentary filmmaker as a meta-theatrical cue, creating a hyper-observational style of storytelling. The narrative is at times disjointed. There are long monologues that go into somewhat dry detail of corporate jargon, television industry politics and long international flights.
At first amusing and intriguing, the clinical detachment threatens to lose the play’s momentum and tests the patience, often taking me out of the story. Yet the mundane details create a false sense of security that makes what’s to come all the more shocking.
Clarke commands the stage with absolute precision. She delivers a masterclass in physical detail, bouncing about the stage and miming interactions with her children with a physicality so precise it’s mesmerising in itself.
She balances the often-jarring shifts in tone with remarkable control. Yet all that exuberance hides an emotional restraint that’s haunting. At times I found myself wanting some more explosive, emotional moments. But this seems to be the writer’s intention: to build a foreboding undercurrent that hits us square between the eyes in the final moments.
While the climax almost misses its mark after the script’s more detached stretches, Justine Clarke saves it with an arresting, raw performance that’s transfixing.
Kelly’s script is confronting. It forces us to look at the fragile nature of our ‘civilised’ world. The play makes a powerful comment on gender-based social constructs, targeting how threats to male identity can lead to extreme violence.
Girls & Boys takes you on a journey you thought you knew, only to deliver a whiplash you didn’t see coming.
Girls & Boys is presented by Sydney Theatre Company and runs to 1 November 2026 at Wharf 1 Theatre. Wharf 4/5 Walsh Bay, Sydney NSW 2000.
Tickets are available here.
Website: https://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/whats-on/2026/productions/girls-boys
Socials: https://www.instagram.com/sydneytheatreco/
Hero image: Sam Roberts
Leave a Reply