Girls and Boys, Royal Court

I once studied this area, and in one hundred percent of cases, women saw this behaviour coming, in that they had called the police, and reported living in fear of their husband, before such a thing ever happened.

This is like serial killers, in that one hundred percent of serial killers engage in pyromania and animal abuse kill, but not every person who does this kills.

Similarly, not every woman who grows terrified of their husband's behaviour, and calls the police due to his escalating lack of control and violent outbursts,, has her children killed. But in every case I looked into, the woman called the police, or made some attempt to flee with her children, before this happened.

So my point is that unlike real women, who are not clueless and unobservant, Mulligan's character seems far too blase, leading up to the incident. This feels phony. I described her behaviour as being "a tourist in her own life." That's what I meant by that phrase.

So, yes it's her story, but through the mind of a.man who doesn't seem to know much about women this actually happens to, and is faithless to those real women and children.

And boy, is he faithless to boys. The caricature of the boy playing violent suggests boys are naturally like that, whereas it would have to be socialised by her, her husband, and his peers, because until testosterone is pumped into him at a later age, his brain is essentially no different from a girl's brain. So Kelly appears to be engaging in misandry, unsubtly at that.

Digression: When I said 100 percent of women (murdered by their partners) called the police, I was referring to research I did into some 60 women murdered by their male partners in the United States in the mid nineties. At the time, I was trying to determine if it was justifiable for battered women to kill their partners while they were sleeping, on the basis that the law wasn't protecting them, and calling the police hadn't stopped the murders. Expert witnesses were testifying at the time that such murders were actually in "self defence", because the women had a battered women "syndrome."

Back to the play. I imagine the statistics regarding filial murder that you quote also include the 43 percent of mothers who kill their own children, as well as the 57 percent of fathers who kill their own children, and are not limited to the MUCH rarer case of family anihilation, where a man (usually) sets out to kill everyone in his family, including himself. It is this latter category that I think this play is about, and such rare cases are much more akin to the research I did in the nineties than the case of a depressed mum killing herself and her kids.

The fact that the play links the prepubescent little boy's violent playtime to the father's depressed withdrawal makes plain that this show is intent on simplifying all the issues and demonising men, and the character is a mere vehicle to suggest this demonisation.

This inconsistent character can spot the minutest social faux pas in the beginning, but later she mindlessly and ridiculously seems to classify her son as a sort of male monster, and she blunders past the fact that her husband is planning to kill her, a circumstance that I couldn't find a single instance of in my above mentioned research, anecdotal as it is.

I thought it made Carey Mulligan's character look stupid, demonised men and little boys, and misrepresented the horror of the lives of real women who live through this sort of thing.

If this play were only entertainment, I wouldn't care. But it is also anti-male propaganda, that will lead to people getting the wrong idea about the issues.