Review: Girls and Boys at Nottingham Playhouse

Girls and Boys at the Nottingham Playhouse is storytelling at its finest. This one woman play, performed by Nottingham’s very own Aisling Loftus, leads the audience on the journey of a relationship which in its conclusion forces us to pivot back to the beginning and reconsider everything. Not only what we have seen and heard on the stage, but the nature of our own entanglements.  

Dennis Kelly, the Tony, Emmy, and Olivier award-winning author of Matilda the Musical, and Channel 4’s Utopia, delivers a script that was first performed in London 2018 and now has its regional premier at The Nottingham Playhouse.  

Starting at their first meet, we are taken from the early days of a seemingly entertaining first hook up, into passion accompanied by predictably outstanding sex and a subsequent meander through the apparent banal normality of marriage, careers and the challenge of raising of two young children.

The monologue moves between scenes seamlessly as the unnamed woman addresses the audience directly and in turn places herself within a rose-tinted set, offering up days spent with her children, whose imagined presence carries the weight of the questions that the play eventually asks. 

For all its seriousness, this is at many times a very funny play. In a recent interview with The Left Lion, Loftus talked of her love of Theatre, citing the relationship that can be created with an audience. It is here that her performance excels, and the familiarity of her Nottingham accent is an added bonus. The quick wit of her character provides laugh out loud moments and Loftus enables an intimacy and authenticity that is resonant of good situational stand-up. Dissolving both disbelief and distance and giving the sense of hearing a story that is both true and being told amongst a small group of friends. 

In Girls and Boys, Kelly has undoubtedly written an outstanding script, within which, as a one woman, one act play, there is nowhere for an actor to hide. Loftus brilliantly meets the challenge by embracing the narrative to tenderly and subtly expose the nuance of her character’s humour, intelligence and pain. Just as she looks backwards to gain understanding, it is only in retrospect that we realise the layers of meaning contained in the selection of her reminiscences. There are times of significant shock, where the script and Loftus has to hold the audience as well as the trauma of the character. The brilliance of this play and Loftus’s performance, is how neither shies away from these challenges. 

As we race towards the romance of Valentines Day, Girls and Boys asks us to consider deeper questions about relationships, gender, power and control. To quote a bit of Chekov, (and why not?) the famous Russian playwright said, ‘The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them’ and that is what this play does. By the end the audience was left in stunned silence which quickly became a quiet questioning of what had just been witnessed. 

Nottingham Playhouse is flying high! Following on from being named as Theatre of the Year 2025 in The Stage Awards in January, this run of Girls and Boys can only add to its prestige. Be warned it is a heart-breaking and engrossing story that asks its audience compelling questions, but isn’t that exactly what great theatre should do?    

Girls and Boys runs at the Nottingham Playhouse from 8 February - 1 March 2025.