Theatre in Review: Girls and Boys (Minetta Lane Theatre)Carey Mulligan's performance in Girls and Boys is so assured, so thoroughly gripping, that it generates considerable suspense: Can she possibly sustain such intensity, her effortless command over the audience, for the entirety of the play's ninety-minute running time? Especially given the highly sensitive nature of the text -- more about that in a minute -- one starts to fear that, sooner or later, she must put a foot wrong, and a jarring note will be struck. After all, she's only human, isn't she? Having seen Girls and Boys, I'm not so sure about that last proposition, so preternaturally sure-handed is the actress' work here. Standing at an angle and shifting her weight like a boxer about to enter the ring, armed with a stare strong enough to make walls crumble, and reaching beyond the proscenium with an arm ending in fingers long enough to scoop up two or three audience members at a time, she takes the entire auditorium into her confidence, turning the Minetta Lane into a confessional where absolution will be withheld. And there's an unnerving precision in her voice that signals, however subliminally, that she will be the most reliable of guides, a kind of Virgil taking us on a tour of her personal hell. It's a tour that traverses several time periods, taking Mulligan's character, known only as Woman, from a frank admission of her misspent youth to the warmly affectionate, and very funny, account of how she met the man who would become her husband. (It's an elaborate anecdote about an Italian airport, a delayed easyJet flight, and some scheming models, and it's priceless.) The narrative then switches gears to trace her entry into the world of documentary filmmaking, first as "the development executive's assistant's executive assistant," then, eventually, as a successful producer. (Her account of the first job interview, for the lowliest of positions, tells you volumes about her tremendous nerve.) Eventually, she owns her own business, is married, and is the mother of two; her spouse has a successful career importing wardrobes from the Continent. By the time one of her films is in contention for a BAFTA Award, her life is, on the surface, positively idyllic. Except that, from the very beginning, there is something so eerily controlled about the actress' presentation that one senses something uniquely awful is in the offing. For one thing, she describes her family members in the past tense. ("He was proud of me.") A creeping feeling of dread is not allayed by her account of their diverging career paths; she racks up successes as her husband's business slides into failure. Even more striking is how the lengthy passages of direct address are broken up by at-home sequences in which she tries to corral her children -- settling arguments, keeping their mud sculptures out of the house, and trying to grasp the labyrinthine rules of their made-up games. The turning point occurs when she steps out of one such scene and admits she knows that her little boy and girl aren't there. And, furthermore, she knows why they are not. From there, it is a short trip to the sort of horror from which one would desperately like to avert one's eyes, if only one knew how. The first terrible revelation is the narrator's acknowledgment that, rather than really grasping her husband's character, she invented him, imposing on him the character of a man she needed to love. It is a realization that comes too late and leads directly to the fate of the children. I will only say that the surgical precision of playwright Dennis Kelly's words, combined with Mulligan's ruthlessly unsentimental delivery, makes it all the more appalling. It perfectly sets up the conclusion, a series of musings on the inherent aggression of men that, under other circumstances, might seem tendentious or even trendy, but here carries the force of an indictment that cannot be wished away. The director, Lyndsey Turner, has gotten out of Mulligan the performance of her career so far, and it comes, in part, from treating Kelly's finely wrought words with such tremendous care; this is the sort of story that graces the covers of tabloid newspapers, but as handled here, there is nothing exploitative about it. Instead, it forces us to look inside ourselves, to wonder if there isn't something fundamentally, irretrievable wrong with us, not least our inability to value happiness when it is there, for free and for the taking. Turner's design team has provided a sleek, semi-abstract environment that is just the right setting for this tale. Es Devlin's set consists of a shallow box for the limbo area from which Mulligan addresses the audience; alternatively, the back wall goes up to reveal a living room/kitchen, which, except for tiny splashes of color, is denuded of detail. (The book covers are blank, the fabrics have no pattern, and everything is the same pale blue.) Intriguingly, the projection designer, Luke Halls, provides brief photo flashes of imagery overlaid on the set, supplying, if only for a second, the missing colors and textures. Oliver Fenwick's lighting deftly handles the set in both versions, although he could provide a tad more upstage coverage in the living room; when Mulligan gets a little too far upstage, her face is hard to see. David McSeveney's sound design provides the musical chords that bridge the scene changes, along with such effects as a television broadcast. Girls and Boys is the kind of production that makes one regard its artists with fresh eyes. Kelly's book for the musical Matilda and his rather mild comedy Taking Care of Baby do not hint at the power that he summons in this text. Turner's best work, directing Machinal on Broadway and the drama Chimerica in the West End, had an epic feel; here she shows a knack for drama as intimate and painful as an Ingmar Bergman film. And Mulligan, a perfectly capable, and sometimes inspired, performer on stage and in film, is, in a word, stunning. A simple coming-together of three talents has achieved something vanishingly rare on our stages: an authentic contemporary tragedy. -- David Barbour 
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