FOUNT OF DEGRADATION 
BOB EVANS 
02/03/1991 
Sydney Morning Herald 
  
EVERY now and again a play like The Boys comes along and we realise afresh why, for the sake of Australian theatre, it is so important to preserve the Stables and to maintain a resident company with an identity, a history and a level of expertise in that priceless space. 
When the play opened this week, there was a more than the usual ripple of excitement and anticipation. As well as the frisson of controversy, there was an expectation of significance. 

The Boys set off intense debate when it was produced at the 1988 Playwrights' Conference. It was hailed by some as a courageous exploration of a painful subject and denounced by others as misguided and misogynist. The atrocities perpetrated in the rape and murder of Anita Cobby were fresh in everyone's mind. 

In a preface to the play, Gordon Graham has insisted that The Boys is not"a thinly disguised documentary of that particular outrage". Rather, he argues, the play is inspired by countless acts of hatred inflicted on women by men and aims to expose the culture which produces such feelings of loathing and violence. 

In outline, the trigger for the story is that three brothers rape and murder a woman on the very day that the eldest of the men is released from jail after serving a year for assault. 

But Graham avoids any gratuitous or sensational impulse by having most of the action occur in retrospect. At the end of two establishing scenes, introducing the extended Sprague family - mother, brothers and girlfriends -the murder-rape has been committed; two of the brothers, Glenn and Stevie, have been arrested, and the third, Brett, the eldest and the instigator, is on the run. 

From that point on the play explores two major threads: one is the build up to the murder-rape, the other is the aftermath of the arrest and trial. In the first strand the focus is on the men, in the second it shifts to the women. 

Each strand deals with the journey of a central character. With the men it is the decline of Glenn, the middle brother (played by David Field), who has tried for a year to assert his independence, especially from Brett (David Wenham), and to establish a life outside the vicious family circle with its self-perpetuating legacy of violence, rejection and rock-bottom self-esteem. 

With the women it is Jackie, Glenn's girl-friend (played by Shani Wood), who moves from being an antagonistic, judgmental outsider to becoming the locus of truth among the women - Sandra, the long-suffering, all-forgiving mother (Lynette Curran); Michelle, who's waited faithfully for Brett's release(Lisbeth Kennelly); and, Nola (Pamela Katt), desperately insecure and pregnant to the youngest brother, Stevie (Peter Lehner). 

Working backwards from the deed of violence, the play charts the explosive reunion of the brothers, the reassertion of control by Brett through intimidation of the family, especially Glenn, and builds to a fury of self-loathing and masculine insecurity amid the reluctant acquiescence by the women in the name of loyalty and love which, with the exception of Jackie's futile resistance, borders on complicity. 

Once again the intimacy of the Stables and its tiny stage supports a dynamic ensemble of actors, who, under the direction of Alex Galeazzi, work with abundant energy, commitment and heart-wrenching accuracy. 

The set design by Tim Kobin of semi-transparent corrugated fibreglass sheets, standing vertical to form a back wall, their tops cut into saw-tooth serrations and the back seat of a car serving as a lounge, combines to capture the degraded urban landscape in which this family lives out its violent destiny. It is powerfully reinforced by a sound-scape designed by John Gordon 

The Boys is not an easily palatable play. Gordon Graham, to his credit, has succeeded in creating a play characterised by qualities of suspense and humour, compassion and acute observation. Dramatically, it is mesmeric; thematically, it is life-affirming. It's a work that has to be seen.