Stalker drama is full of suspense

10 April 2012

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.

Vicki Mortimer's revolving stage set, with an odd Perspex central screen, makes the frequent location changes cumbersome. But Ian Rickson's superb, beautifully acted production, captures the sexual tension and simmering social unease.

There's more, however, to Boy Gets Girl than simple narrative. Gilman disturbingly suggests that modern culture, from real life to cinema, helps condition men to regard the hectic pursuit of women as a primitive sport. In this analysis stalking is a warped extension of the battle to get your girl. It also seems that stalker and stalked are mirror images of each other. Theresa, whom attractive Katrin Cartlidge makes the model of pained, prim repression, and Demetri Goritsas's ingratiating Tony are alike in their isolation. Karl Johnson's exquisitely comic, septuagenarian filmmaker, whose movies are all about big breasts, wins friendship from feminist Theresa because she realises his loneliness is akin to hers.

The blind, bar-room date of Tony and Theresa sparks a delectable comedy of dating manners. The body language speaks intimate volumes - the man crudely invading, the woman fendingoff. Tony, something small and stupidish in computers, tries to hook Theresa, who's someone big and bright in magazine journalism, by the force of a personality that's no more than a hot-air breeze. His general ignorance comes up against the wall of her strong mind.

Goritsas lacks the sexual charisma to explain how he persuades Theresa to a subsequent dinner. But then on he's virtually unseen. His flowers and phone calls, messages and threats bombard her, while Lolly Susi's almost impotent arm of the Manhattan law only advises escape. Miss Gilman unconvincingly refuses to allow Cartlidge's poignant Theresa to break down. But Boy Gets Girl enthralls in its depicting of a weird, sexual phenomenon.

Boy Gets Girl

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