Boys Will Be Boys (theatre)
Sep. 21st, 2016 09:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandra"Women are just men with less money."
Astrid Wentworth is a successful city broker and the only female broker in her firm. She takes on a trainee, Priya, and coaches her in how to succeed, mainly by telling her how terrible the firm and everyone there is, herself not excepted, with a lot of rapid-fire profanity. In her spare time she hires a female prostitute, possibly to befriend her, and fails to notice events moving to their inevitable conclusion. There's a frame narrative with her drinking alone at a bar, so things are obviously not going to end well, and cabaret songs, and all the actors are women, either as women or playing men, which mainly means bad behaviour and peeing standing up, and as is possibly apparent, the performances were strong but the play really didn't work for me. I spent the last twenty minutes or so thinking wistfully about Caryl Churchill's Top Girls instead, which despite being over 30 years older is far more revolutionary.
I disliked Top Girls intensely when I first encountered it, and then I had it again as a set text at university and ended up writing an essay on my least favourite character, Patient Griselda (and reading the whole Decameron in the process), during which I argued myself into liking it a lot. I've seen a few productions since then, and it always works for me even when it feels like it's not going to (the backwards structure, the hallucinogenic first act), and it keeps bringing up new things. A lot of my early dislike was the result of feeling pressured to be and feel certain ways - in literature, in life - and not realising that the play was questioning those tensions as much as portraying them.
In Boys Will Be Boys there's some attempt at this - Astrid explicitly denies any traumatic event in her past (so explicitly, actually, that it's almost a case of protesting too much) but we end up with old stories and old power structures. Priya, passed out at an office party, is raped by another junior, who films it for the others; Astrid tells her not to complain, but she goes over Astrid's head to the higher boss, who offers Priya power in exchange for a gagging order. Priya wants the junior who raped her fired, but she also wants Astrid's job, and she wants to see Astrid when the boss tells her. No-one in this story is particularly likeable anyway, but the play ducks out on actually confronting any power structures.
This was the last one of my season pass plays, and the one I was least sure about - it was either this or a surrealist play with an elk. I will have to check out the reviews to see how that one plays out...
Astrid Wentworth is a successful city broker and the only female broker in her firm. She takes on a trainee, Priya, and coaches her in how to succeed, mainly by telling her how terrible the firm and everyone there is, herself not excepted, with a lot of rapid-fire profanity. In her spare time she hires a female prostitute, possibly to befriend her, and fails to notice events moving to their inevitable conclusion. There's a frame narrative with her drinking alone at a bar, so things are obviously not going to end well, and cabaret songs, and all the actors are women, either as women or playing men, which mainly means bad behaviour and peeing standing up, and as is possibly apparent, the performances were strong but the play really didn't work for me. I spent the last twenty minutes or so thinking wistfully about Caryl Churchill's Top Girls instead, which despite being over 30 years older is far more revolutionary.
I disliked Top Girls intensely when I first encountered it, and then I had it again as a set text at university and ended up writing an essay on my least favourite character, Patient Griselda (and reading the whole Decameron in the process), during which I argued myself into liking it a lot. I've seen a few productions since then, and it always works for me even when it feels like it's not going to (the backwards structure, the hallucinogenic first act), and it keeps bringing up new things. A lot of my early dislike was the result of feeling pressured to be and feel certain ways - in literature, in life - and not realising that the play was questioning those tensions as much as portraying them.
In Boys Will Be Boys there's some attempt at this - Astrid explicitly denies any traumatic event in her past (so explicitly, actually, that it's almost a case of protesting too much) but we end up with old stories and old power structures. Priya, passed out at an office party, is raped by another junior, who films it for the others; Astrid tells her not to complain, but she goes over Astrid's head to the higher boss, who offers Priya power in exchange for a gagging order. Priya wants the junior who raped her fired, but she also wants Astrid's job, and she wants to see Astrid when the boss tells her. No-one in this story is particularly likeable anyway, but the play ducks out on actually confronting any power structures.
This was the last one of my season pass plays, and the one I was least sure about - it was either this or a surrealist play with an elk. I will have to check out the reviews to see how that one plays out...
no subject
Date: 2016-09-21 11:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-22 02:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-09-21 06:00 pm (UTC)I confess I'm curious.
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Date: 2016-09-22 02:57 am (UTC)