Carey Mulligan
A five-star return to the London stage
Girls and Boys Royal Court
Currently transfixing our attention as the coolly self-possessed detective trying to fathom the complicatedly murky goings-on in David Hare’s BBC thriller Collateral, Carey Mulligan is also treading the boards at the Royal Court where she made her acting debut, aged 19, in 2004. Such has been her success over the ensuing years, especially on the big screen (An Education, The Great Gatsby, Suffragette), that she could probably sign up to read a phone directory on stage and people would queue from dawn to watch her.
Dennis Kelly’s latest – already sold out, thanks to her star power – is rather more substantial, enthralling and demanding than that. It’s a 90-minute monologue in which an unnamed woman recounts a relationship with a man, from its casual, hope-filled start to its ferocious, numbing finish. And if anyone was in any doubt that Mulligan, 32, is a phenomenal talent, here’s the proof in triplicate.
She proves a born storyteller, getting us to hang on every word. She displays spot on comic timing, too, every articulate hand gesture and wry arch of her eyebrows contributing. And she succeeds in taking us to the darkest recesses of human behaviour without a jot of sensationalism.
I need to tread carefully: part of the power of the evening lies in guessing where we’re going to end up, but even if we join the dots, we’re left slightly wrong-footed by the attitude asserted by her steadfast refusal to lay on a grandly legible response, and by her instinct to withhold, not outpour.
Crudely put – in terms of Kelly’s own career – you could say that the piece begins on a note of confessed, messy hedonistic abandon, not a million miles from his female-led BBC sitcom Pulling – before pushing forwards to confront an incident as gory as anything seen in his notorious Channel 4 shocker Utopia.
“I met my husband in the queue to board an easyjet flight and I have to say I took an instant dislike to the man,” run the opening lines. Mulligan, all dimpled charm, establishes her character as a natural raconteur with an attractively defiant working-class chip on her shoulders. Barefoot, in tailored plum trousers and mustard silk shirt, she holds her own in an equally beguiling hazy-blue boxy set by Es Devlin (direction is by Lyndsey Turner).
Behind this, a while later, is disclosed a Saturday supplement-stylish living room (its fleetingly seen colour magically bleaching out) into which, at points, our heroine roams. Here, she re-enacts domestic life, complete with two demanding young kids, that the couple, forging divergent careers (she, finding success, in TV docs, he, less so, in antique wardrobe sales), went on to create after that initial haphazard encounter in Naples.
If we thought Mulligan had it tough talking 19 to the dozen, sustaining an Estuary-ish accent to boot, these interludes require another order of skill: miming the physical interactions with her lovably troublesome brood (never actually seen or heard). Girls and Boys is the title, and that’s enough to spark thoughts on the ramifications of these apparently innocuous scenes. To what extent are the seeds of injurious gender division sown here, in childhood “play”? Does the devil of adult professional jealousy, the contention of divorce and dangerous fragility of reason lie in the detail of our ordinary formative experience?
I’m not sure I should add much more than this, besides noting that the Royal Court is usually at its best when it addresses the subject of violence; here, thanks above all to Mulligan’s tour de force, its main-house offering strikes annihilatingly home.