Audience members of all genders, especially this cisgender male reviewer, surely felt their privilege firmly checked by the end of last night’s (12 August) opening performance at Fairfax Studio in Melbourne Arts Centre.
Set on the evening of a debate final for an elite Year 12 boys’ prep school, the one-room format of the play keeps the action locked while driving a ticking-clock time limit to when the four boys in question are set to present their arguments.
The topic of debate, and a compelling framework for the play as a whole, is ‘feminism has failed all women — affirmative’. The diverse line-up of characters, played by female and non-binary actors in a playful inverse of the Shakespearean tradition of men playing women, has much to say of the present state of Instagram virtue-signalling and misguided 'not all men' rhetoric.
Image © Ben Andrews
An amusingly bone-headed example of this comes in the form of one boy’s zealous repetition of “I love women”, as though this alone can absolve them of the prism of wealth-cushioned sexism through which they view girls as status markers. As much as the work interrogates the muffled voice of female consent under the oft-touted protest of ‘she was asking for it’, just as biting a critique is made against private school elitism.
Throughout the play, the question is affectingly raised that when tuition fees total $50,000 per year for the education of a single student, how else are these young men supposed to be raised than with the absolute conviction that they are entitled to everything – including women’s bodies?
Frequently hilarious, and stuffed to the ceiling with energetic commitment from the four lead players, ‘Trophy Boys’ is an excoriating examination of contemporary attitudes to sexism and misogyny from the earliest stages of young male adulthood.
If ever we were fooled into thinking society operated in a post-sexist climate, this sharp new play offers a rivetingly timely debate in the contrary.
This story originally appeared on our sister site, scenestr.
