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Trophy Boys

Boys will be boys.

References to actors will refer to the specific casting I saw on stage at the Theatre Royal in Hobart, Tasmania.

In terms of plot, Trophy Boys is a play about four Australian private school boys who are prepping for a debate. Thematically, it’s about patriarchy; all four characters are played by female or nonbinary actors, and they play up the drag aspect as much as possible (my favourite part: at least three of them have weedy teenage boy moustaches, although the constant air-humping and air-jacking-off was also very funny). They discover the debate topic is “Feminism Has Failed Women”, with them being assigned the affirmative side (and the rival girls school they’re debating taking the negative). Each, in different ways, loudly proclaims his feminism and affection for women in ways that are immediately, obviously, and amusingly hypocritical.

And then, when they decide to indulge in some mild cheating, they discover one of them has been accused of sexual assault by a member of the girls team.

The extraordinary thing about Trophy Boys is how it manages to make both a plot and a single coherent and complex argument. At first, the jokes have that shallowness that comes with topicality; some of the same jokes I’ve been hearing (and even making) since about 2009. The sexual assault plot forces the story to become more specific; not only do the characters have the goal of protecting their egos and reputations, they also have the very specific and material goal of winning the debate. One very funny and wince-inducing moment is when a character points out it’s not impossible that the girls released this statement purely to psyche the boys out and win the debate by default.

One of the interesting things about the play is how the boys end up representing Patriarchy, individual types of boys, and specific characters all at once. Owen (Myfanwy Hocking) is a nerd virgin who aspires to politics, and has memorized not only statistics and jargon, but the exact order of words of things he needs to say to sound feminist. Scott (Tahlia Jamieson) is a sports-mad (and sports-incompetent) man’s boy with a rich lawyer father who has the crudest sense of humour (he’s the one air-jerking-off the most, at least from my memory). Jared (Fran Sweeney-Nash) is the class clown. David (Kidaan Zielleke) strikes me as the one masking most, doing what every other boy is doing to fit in.

Most contemporary comedy plays I’ve seen in the last five or six years tend to feel like The Breakfast Club with a splash of genre on it; a group of people who slowly open up to each other in therapy-as-storytelling. This feels closer to Reservoir Dogs, as the four boys start off in a shaky harmony and masculine posturing, only for a plot to set them all against each other; you’re not literally expecting them to turn guns on each other, but they do end up in a kind of Mexican standoff as pretense falls away and the stakes rise higher and higher.

I’m going to cover the specifics of the production I saw, then jump into analysing the main meat of the play. I’ll put that under a spoiler section on the offchance someone wants to see the play fresh. The production gleefully embraces the drag aspect; literally, in that the early silent brainstorming is represented through an abstract dance sequence, but also generally in that the characters strut and preen and look towards the audience as they speak (though only one character ever breaks the fourth wall directly). Like many gimmicky elements of great stories, this slows down considerably as the story gets more serious, with the sole exception of a moment at the climax where the actors drop their characters to convey famous moments of women not being believed.

SPOILERS

While the mystery is never revealed, each boy eventually uncovers a specific incident in their past that may explain the accusation. A canny (as well as handsome and comedically brilliant) viewer may correctly guess that Owen is going to have the worst incident, given that he’s presented as the most clean-cut and sincere feminist of the group, but none of them come out clean. There are two very clever parts of the climax here: the first is the specific characterisation of Owen.

As I said, he’s played as the virgin nerd who cares deeply about Getting It Right. He’s spent the whole play correcting both others and himself when misspeaking, and when David tells the story of seeing Owen at a party with a falling-down-drunk girl, taking her upstairs to a bedroom for half an hour, Owen’s first response is to ask for a moment to think about he wants to respond. In a play filled with masculine posturing, this is a moment of chilling self-control. This doesn’t necessarily make someone guilty, but it’s definitely something that’ll make you listen carefully to what they say next.

When he does choose to speak, Owen spills out an Alan Shore-like monologue in which he outlines not just the known facts and not even a convincing speculation about how the various possibilities of what would happen if the other boys were to throw him under the bus, but a convincing narrative about how it would turn out and a more helpful one to hold themselves to. This is one of those extraordinary moments in fiction where a single action inspires so many conflicting emotions in me. On one level, I’m in awe of the ownage; Owen’s intelligence in weaving together language he’s picked up into a coherent and logical whole (which is really being impressed by playwright Emmanuel Mattana’s intelligence). 

On another, being horrified at what this says about Owen; the monstrous self-preservation he’s engaging in and the way he’s reducing human beings – real people with real feelings – into building blocks he’s playing with. On a third level, seeing this through the boys’s eyes – all of them do realize, in some way, how monstrous and weak this makes them and what they’ll be complicit in. This is a Pyrric victory, in which they’ll save their own asses but lose the false images they held of themselves at the start.

And finally: the intellectual level. Before the sexual assault comes in, the boys are bouncing around ideas for the debate, and one idea is tackling how patriarchy hurts men, which Owen dismisses on the basis that it can be easily attacked and destroyed. This final turn, as they all come together to work out how to get away with this, suggests something even more horrifying: patriarchy is held up by men because it’s mutually assured destruction.

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