Carey Mulligan Is Perfection in a Play That Isn’t

LONDON — Beware the bonhomie.

That’s just one way of advising playgoers to be on their guard at “Girls & Boys,” the solo play from Tony Award-winning writer Dennis Kelly (“Matilda”) that finds performer Carey Mulligan in cheerfully chatty mode — for the first stretch, at least. The production, which runs through March 17, brings Mulligan, an Oscar-nominated actress, back to the Royal Court Theater for the third time.

Mulligan’s unnamed character is dryly funny on any number of topics, from the vagaries of fate (“I got Southampton,” she says with regard to picking a travel destination at random) to airport etiquette and a job interview that she recollects in painstaking, bitterly comic detail, throwing in a fart joke for emphasis. It’s easy to imagine knocking back a beer or two with her and emerging chums for life.

Listen carefully to her words, however, and you may notice an underlying aggression. At that interview, for instance, Mulligan speaks of her potential employer “sizing me up, like a psychopath weighing up which ear to cut off first.”

So it’s not a complete surprise when events take a shivery twist. (There are also hints in director Lyndsey Turner’s ultraslick production, and in the thanks proffered by Kelly in the published text to Euripides, among others.)

For much of the time, Mulligan stands before us, like a chicly coifed if barefoot comedian eager to corral an expectant audience. Those scenes are interlaced with domestic encounters with two children, who remain unseen but nevertheless seem to demand every reserve of energy that this quick-witted, expletive-prone woman can muster.

The vignettes draw upon Mulligan’s unheralded gifts as a mime artist — suddenly, she must play an entire family — and come with a visual commentary: At various moments, the set from Es Devlin crackles into brightly vivid life, only to revert in an instant to the neutered, anesthetizing look that pervades throughout. (Devlin and Turner, the director, are frequent, and invaluable, collaborators.)

Visual contrast is missing from this landscape. Something else is missing, as well, though to elaborate would result in an unforgivable spoiler. What can be said is that the Mulligan we see at the close of the uninterrupted 90 minutes has an altogether different aspect from the freewheeling raconteur seen at the start. Rather like the U.S. playwright Neil LaBute, who has traversed comparable terrain in such plays as “Bash: Latter-Day Plays,” Kelly addresses humankind’s capacity for violence at every turn. Not even the children are exempt. So far so good, if so depressing, though hardly more so than the world at large. But not content to leave well enough alone, Kelly dresses up his narrative in ways that detract from its power, like some overzealous puppeteer. More than once, there is the sort of rhetorical question — “Does that make sense?” — that in the theater tends to make me queasy, lest an overeager audience member reply. And I’m not sure we need the reminder that this grievous tale represents only one side of the story. Since when did the theater become a courtroom requiring equal time for all?

If the play overreaches for effect, there’s no trace of the sensational in Mulligan’s performance, which is accompanied by a playfulness and quick-wittedness that bypass the gathering thesis-mongering of the final passages. (You can’t help but feel that Kelly devised his play in order to corroborate a grim statistic that’s mentioned near the end.) “Girls & Boys” may work from the outside in, but it’s blessed with an actress whose integrity anchors a play that, without her, might well seem a sleekly oiled con.

For a stage monologue cut from less flashy (but more honest) cloth, try “The B*easts,” written and performed by Monica Dolan. Running at the Bush Theater in West London through March 3, the 65-minute production from director John Hoggarth focuses on Tessa, a 40-something psychotherapist who reports not altogether dispassionately on a case to which her character has a saddening personal connection.

The moral inquiry on view involves a mother who has facilitated breast implants for her 8-year-old daughter amid a hypersexualized culture that, in the language of the play, “wants you to want.” Moving on to embrace the dark web, the depredations of Facebook and a society in which the phone has “become a human right,” Dolan proves as exacting an authorial commentator as she is a compelling stage presence. Forever leaning into the audience so as to gain our confidence, her Tessa becomes our guide in a world that gives genuine cause for alarm.

I would be remiss not to commend (and how!) a third splendid actress — this one a visitor to the London stage. Marylouise Burke has long been a New York theater stalwart, and she has now crossed the Atlantic as the lone U.S. performer in the National Theater premiere of Annie Baker’s ravishing and mysterious “John.” (The production in the Dorfman auditorium finishes March 3.)

Playing the landlady of a Pennsylvania boardinghouse filled to bursting with tchotchkes — if only there were tours of Chloe Lamford’s set! — Burke presides with abiding sweetness over both the (quarrelsome) couple who have come to stay and the play itself: Her character, Mertis, pulls open the floor-length curtains at the start, welcoming us into some gently otherworldly realm. The bows at the end are staged as if in an opera house, and snippets from Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann” prove crucial to the climactic scene.

Amid an impeccable four-person ensemble, Burke is a league apart — not just for a fluty voice possessing cadences all its own but also for her caress of Baker’s signature flourishes. As directed by James Macdonald, the production is nowhere more moving than in Burke’s enumeration of the various collective nouns for birds that include “an exaltation of larks.” By the end of the play’s riveting 3 1/2 hours (with two intermissions), it is we who are among the exalted, having been in the presence of a performer who is an absolute one-off, on either side of the Atlantic.

—

Production Notes:

“Girls & Boys”

Directed by Lyndsey Turner.

Royal Court Jerwood Theater Downstairs, through March 17.

“The B*easts”

Directed by John Hoggarth.

Bush Theater, through March 3.

“John”

Directed by James Macdonald.

National Theater / Dorfman, through March 3.