Carey Mulligan gives a tour-de-force performance (Picture: Marc Brenner)

Carey Mulligan is at her best in Girls & Boys, a tragic, emotionally pulverising new play about loss that has a distinct freshness to it, which the star feeds from as she performs on stage alone.

Playwright Dennis Kelly is equally hot right now. He was behind the National Theatre’s recent Pinocchio, but at the Royal Court, he is being truly innovative. Girls & Boys is a fresh piece of writing, and the first major play to tackle family annihilation, the act of a family member killing one of their own family. Why does it happen, and why are the killers mainly men?

Carey Mulligan is the show’s unnamed performer, and gives a tour-de-force performance on stage alone for a solid one-and-a-half-hours. Dressed fashionably, she looks like Victoria Beckham, but has David’s accent. A hard worker from a humble background, one of the other messages of Dennis Kelly’s play is that anyone can achieve success if they try hard. ‘No one’s special,’ she chimes. ‘We’re all just weird looking chimps’.

Carey Mulligan breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience (Picture: Marc Brenner)

At first, director Lyndsey Turner has the unnamed woman standing on a pastille blue stage, addressing the audience as she tells (very funny) jokes about her life, and how she got into making major movies. Carey excellently dishes the vivid descriptions.


She went on something of a gap year, before bullshitting her way into an entry-level job where she rose through the ranks. Along the way, she married her dream man and had two children, but six months of passion turned into droll and loveless monotony, and she suspects him of having an affair. Carey captivates as she directly addresses the audience as moods shift from humour to tragedy.

The style feels aggressively, astonishingly new. The show presents its arresting subject matter with just one extended monologue, with fourth-wall-breaking elements. Its innovative nose reminds of Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s musical London Road, about the murders of the Ipswich prostitutes, but instead of using music to tackle the shocking theme, Dennis Kelly stages the dreamlike presence of those that have been murdered.

Carey Mulligan confidently delivers scenes where she seemingly interacts with her deceased children; she finishes their sentences, asks them questions, plays games and even cradles them – although no-one’s there. It’s a clever trick to stage the actual reality of her life’s physical voids.

Carey Mulligan is spectacular at pretending to be on stage with others in dreamlike scenes (Picture: Marc Brenner)

Coupled with the strong writing, it feels like Carey really is joined on stage by others, and the trick creates genuine spook.

Dennis Kelly’s real interest though is in promoting the awfulness that is family annihilation, and its troubling link to men. Carey’s omnipresent character (she doesn’t stop talking for more than five seconds, nor does she ever really leave the stage) says a ‘cold hard fact’ is that 95% of those who commit the crime are men.


The play is strongest when it depicts that fact as tragic and biological, rather than speculate about men and gender as a whole. Rather than an exercise in finger-pointing or gender bias, this is a raw story of one woman’s grief and loss.

Family annihilation is a terrible and confusing thing. We can’t understand it. Girls & Boys at least gives victims and survivors a voice, and that is a testimony to the true power of theatre.

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