Dennis Kelly on his dark and funny play on love and male dominance.

First comes love, then comes marriage… but what if a relationship ends in catastrophe? Girls & Boys, Auckland Theatre Company’s September production written by award-winning British playwright Dennis Kelly, explores the hellish unravelling of a passionate romance through the eyes of the woman, and asks just how well we really know the ones we love.

The original Girls & Boys, written in 2016, starred Carey Mulligan and the play has since gone on to make a powerful impact on audiences around the globe, from London and New York to France, the Netherlands and Australia.

It’s one of many critically acclaimed pieces of writing from Kelly’s career, which spans roles as a screenwriter and TV producer, along with forays into musical theatre, notably Matilda the Musical (with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin), for which Kelly won a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical.

The New Zealand production of Girls & Boys is directed by Eleanor Bishop and stars Spanish-born actress Beatriz Romilly, a West End star now based in New Zealand. She plays a dynamic mother, wife and business owner who recounts the story of how she fell for her charismatic antique dealer husband.

As the passion recedes into banal domestic life, the depths of their downfall are revealed through the character’s monologue and “interactions” with her two squabbling children, which the audience imagine to be sharing the stage.

Critics have roundly praised the play for the honest way in which it deals with the unthinkable; Kelly himself has described it as “very disturbing” yet, when he first attended a performance with Mulligan in the role, he was struck by just how funny it was.

“She was hilarious,” says Kelly, on a Zoom from his cosy writing shed at the bottom of his London garden. “There’s a humour to it, but it also has a very dark side. It talks about some really difficult stuff, and it asks the audience to go to quite a difficult place.”

Kelly first became interested in writing the story of a marriage undone by violence after hearing of similar incidents in the news. His ex-wife, an actress, had long joked about him penning a monologue for her to perform and, early in the writing process, he took inspiration from Greek tragedies. Writing the 90-minute Girls & Boys as a one-woman show made more sense once he delved into its themes of male dominance.

“It’s unashamedly one-sided,” Kelly explains. “We get the other side of this particular story quite a lot, as society is much more interested in perpetrators. We always want to know what they were like, what was going through their minds. We forget the people they’ve done these terrible things to.”

So Kelly didn’t give the perpetrator a voice and wrote the nameless protagonist based on a combination of his own personality – “because writing is always autobiographical in a way” – and the accomplishments of five or six women he’d worked with. She’s also informed by Kelly’s working-class background, growing up poor in a North London council estate in a class-conscious society.

Like so many of the characters he’s written in the past, this woman is imperfect and not the type to subscribe to the ideal of the supermum. When Kelly wrote the play, he was not a parent himself but now, as the dad of a 5-year-old, he relates to the emotional rollercoaster of parenting – the irony that loving another so fiercely means they have the capacity to break your heart.

“She’s trying to balance this and balance that. She’s got a boy who just wants to blow things up; the daughter is much more considered but they’re both capable of being really mean. If you’re writing well, you also put your flaws in there,” he adds. “I really began to admire her and like her. I felt she deserved her own play.”

Kelly says he recently realised his characters aren’t necessarily cool or aspirational but authentic in that they’re people who are “a bit shit”. Kelly is unapologetically himself too – funny, at times sweary, and, as he confesses, not the intellectual or academic some global theatre crowds expect of him.

“What I should probably do right after I get off the call with you is sit down a read a play or read Proust. I bet that’s what Harold Pinter would do. I won’t do that,” he laughs. “I’ll watch some TV. I’ve got to a stage in my life where I’m not ashamed of that at all.”

It’s this honest approach that has been a winning formula in a career that has spanned film, TV, and the theatre. Among his most noted works are the gritty plays Debris and DNA, the dark and dystopian TV drama Utopia, the sitcom Pulling, and the family-friendly musicals Matilda the Musical (for which he also wrote the screenplay) and Pinocchio. He is now working on a TV series about male offenders in prison, along with two American projects.

Meanwhile Girls & Boys continues to be relevant and thought-provoking, even if a lot has changed since he wrote the play. The MeToo movement has long since ignited the conversation around male toxicity and the way in which women have historically had to negotiate it – but it’s a topic that still deserves to be explored, he says.

“I’m not a violent man, but I know I’ve got the capacity in me to be violent. I know I could be, and that there’s another version of me in another universe that is really cruel and enjoys violence and enjoys dominating. As a man, it’s something I feel a responsibility to talk about.”

Girls & Boys, ASB Waterfront Theatre, September 10-22. Content advice: Offensive language, graphic descriptions of family violence, murder and suicide, sexual references, and depiction of psychological distress. Not suitable for anyone under 18 years of age. Tickets available at atc.co.nz/whats-on/2024-season/girls-boys