Boy Gets Girl ( Archived )

Reviews

newspaper reviews

(L TO R) Katrin Cartlidge; Katrin Cartlidge, Lucy Punch, Jason Watkins; Nicholas Day

Photography by Ivan Kyncl.

Direction: Ian Rickson. Design: Vicki Mortimer, Lighting: Paule Constable, Sound: Paul Arditti, Music: Stephen Warbeck

Cast: Katrin Cartlidge, Nicholas Day, Demetri Goritsas, Karl Johnson, Lucy Punch, Lolly Susi, Jason Watkins.

Despite its serious framework and the provocative questions it raises, Boy Gets Girl works as a powerful psychological thriller and suspense drama too. For Rebecca Gilman, who won the Evening Standard Most Promising Playwright award in 1999, faces up to the subject of heterosexual stalking. In her scenario, Theresa, a shrewd, Manhattan journalist becomes the object of a young man’s obsession. Given an American (and English) legal system that offers too little protection for the victim of stalking, Gilman charts a process of fearful decline and fall. Theresa abandons apartment, job and even her identity to escape the obsessive clutches of Tony, her stalker. …Ian Rickson’s superb, beautifully acted production, captures the sexual tension and simmering social unease.

Evening Standard

Gilman’s brilliantly written play is an acute observation on a very modern nightmare: girl meets boy, boy gets fixated, girl is eventually forced to change her life radically and, ultimately, herself. Within Ian Rickson’s tensely directed production, it becomes many more things: a spine-tingling drama, a frequently funny piece of contemporary realism and an ever-evolving debate on the infinite complexities of gender interaction.

Katrin Cartlidge is fierce and compelling as Theresa – the thirty-something, single career woman subjected to a barrage of increasingly intrusive and violent phonecalls from a virtual stranger.

…The audience doesn’t escape participation either: thanks to Vicki Mortimer’s intimate set, our observation becomes uncomfortably close to voyeurism. Gilman’s restless, never preachy analysis doesn’t let up for a minute: her most devastating revelation, beyond the shock of her plotline, is that within the world of boys and girls there are few fixed or certain truths.

Metro

The best parts of the play are those that show the slow erosion of Theresa’s confidence. She is clearly a good writer and editor who enjoys the intimate exchanges of a civilised literary magazine. But, in one very funny scene, she is sent to interview a veteran mammary-obsessed movie director and becomes more interested in passing judgement than eliciting information. Even with a sympathetic colleague, Mercer, she becomes snappish and hostile when he tactlessly broaches the idea of a piece on gender relations.

What Gilman does expertly is show how the stalker invades every aspect of the victim’s life: not merely her physical privacy but also her professional skill and sense of identity.

… Katrin Cartlidge is perfect as Theresa: she shows exactly how the character’s sharpness and irony dwindles into a rattled defensiveness when she finds her life under siege.

Jason Watkins as the helpless Mercer, Nicholas Day as a benign editor and Karl Johnson as the grizzled lech of a movie director, lend impeccable support.

The Guardian

….Without ever losing its sharp wit, the play expands into a truly chilling and affecting study of human isolation and vulnerability in big cities.

… Ian Rickson directs the piece with his characteristically sure, musical feel for structure, and he draws from Ms Cartlidge a splendid central performance. It’s unbearable that this tall, bonily handsome and winningly self-reliant woman should be evicted from her proud, bookish seclusion and left dependent on the kindness of colleagues.

…As with newspaper articles that effectively teach you how to make bombs, there’s something a bit dangerous about this piece. You learn the simple steps by which you can totally destroy a person’s life. But, then, art should be risky at the Royal Court.

Independent

Ian Rickson’s laser-precise production of Boy Gets Girl, with the wonderful Katrin Cartlidge – the rangy star of Mike Leigh’s Naked who turns understatement into magnetism creates something rare in the theatre: a sense of physical fear.

The Observer