It is often said that a violent man “lost control”. Girls & Boys asks a far more frightening question: what if the violence was not an absence of control, but its most absolute expression?
Dennis Kelly’s play begins like a romantic comedy. A woman tells us about meeting her future husband during an argument at an airport, before attraction turns into marriage, careers and children. She is funny, direct and sharply observant, finding absurdity in the compromises and minor humiliations of ordinary family life. Yet as the balance of success within the marriage begins to shift, so does the meaning of the story she is telling.
Under Mitchell Butel’s restrained direction, the production does not announce this shift or warn us how to interpret it. It allows the relationship to remain recognisable for as long as possible. That matters because family violence is frequently made comprehensible through the idea of the monster: an obviously dangerous man whose violence could have been predicted by anyone sensible enough to see him clearly. The monster reassures us because he is fundamentally different from everyone else.
Girls & Boys offers no such reassurance.
Justine Clarke holds the stage alone, speaking directly to the audience with the ease of someone telling an outrageous story over drinks. Her comic timing makes the early account genuinely entertaining rather than merely providing temporary relief before the “serious” play begins. The warmth is essential. Clarke allows us to understand why this relationship was once exciting, why this man was once desirable and why the life they built appeared not merely ordinary, but good.
As the story darkens, Clarke does not abandon that woman for a more conventionally tragic version of her. The humour, intelligence and bluntness remain. What changes is the weight carried by every pause and recollection. She moves between narration and moments from family life with extraordinary control, making people who never physically appear feel present throughout the room. It is a performance that refuses to reduce survival to suffering. This woman has experienced something incomprehensible, but she remains more than the worst thing that has happened to her.
Ailsa Paterson’s set is devastatingly ingenious.
The room initially resembles an old advertisement for perfect domesticity: bold colour, immaculate symmetry and furniture arranged with the artificial precision of a display home. When the curtains open, floor-to-ceiling shelves reveal the ordinary household objects from which a family history is made.
Yet the room feels less lived in than remembered.
Every opening is curved. Every hard edge has been softened, as though the house itself has been designed to keep everyone inside it safe. At first, that makes the space feel playful—almost nostalgic. By the end, its gentleness becomes unbearable. This is not simply the memory of a home. It is an attempt to construct the home that memory still desperately needs.
The design therefore does not illustrate the story. It completes it. Long before the audience understands what this room represents, it has placed us inside the woman’s grief, longing and desperate continuation of care. The meaning was visible from the beginning; we simply did not yet possess the knowledge required to recognise it.
That same delayed recognition shapes Kelly’s writing. Earlier moments are not replaced by later revelations—they are transformed by them. Casual resentments, career frustrations and shifts in domestic power begin to look different when viewed as parts of a pattern. This is how coercive control operates: not necessarily as one clearly identifiable act, but through the accumulation of entitlement, humiliation, restriction and punishment.
The husband’s resentment grows as his wife’s professional life expands and his own contracts. But the play never suggests that her success causes his behaviour. Her autonomy merely reveals what he believes her place should have been. Equality feels like deprivation to someone who understands love through possession; losing authority feels like victimisation to someone who assumed authority was his.
This is why describing extreme family violence as a moment in which someone “snapped” or “lost control” can be dangerously misleading. Such language transforms a pattern into an incident and an act of domination into an emotional malfunction. Girls & Boys understands that what appears to be chaos may instead be punishment: when control over another person can no longer be maintained, violence can become the means through which control is asserted one final time.
The solo form makes that argument even more powerful. The husband is denied a physical presence, an explanatory monologue or an opportunity to make himself psychologically fascinating. We encounter him only through the woman whose life he attempted to define. Kelly’s solo firm, intensifed by Butel’s production, refuses the cultural instinct to centre the perpetrator—to ask what damaged him, what overwhelmed him or what might explain the inexplicable.
Instead, it returns narrative authority to her.
That does not make Girls & Boys an easy experience. Its emotional force comes partly from how successfully it allows us to enjoy the woman’s company before we understand why she has brought us into this room. But the production never uses suffering merely to shock. Every theatrical choice directs attention back towards the same terrible human truth: violence can exist inside love, humour and apparent normality because normality is often the place in which control learns to hide.
Before Girls & Boys, the set looks like a fantasy of domestic happiness. Afterwards, it looks like an act of impossible protection.
The house has no sharp edges.
Only the story does.