Boys Will Be Boys director Sophie Roberts on the depressing reality of being a woman at work in New Zealand.
Photo: Supplied
Director Sophie Roberts is in the first week of rehearsal for Boys Will Be Boys when I speak to her. She’s currently leading her cast – which is studded with Shortland Street stars – through an intensive rehearsal period in Auckland.
Their production, the overtly feminist play Boys Will Be Boys, is a sharp look at feminine ambition and toxic masculinity in the workplace. It looks at what happen to the women who break the glass ceiling– what they gain, what they lose, and the ugly ways they have to break and bend themselves to get there.
Roberts is also the artistic director of the Silo Theatre, and the show’s publicist is quick to point out that Roberts bears no relation to former Saatchi chairman Kevin Roberts, who recently resigned over the backlash to his comments on gender diversity in advertising.
The play is very new, having had its debut in Sydney only last year, and makes its New Zealand debut with Roberts’ production.
It follows Astrid (Amanda Billing), a ruthless currency trader, as she navigates a cesspit of sexist male bankers in her mucky quest to lean in.
“It’s basically a female Wolf of Wall Street… And similarly, it’s not really about banking. It’s about the relationships that this kind of place produces,” Roberts says.
Astrid takes on a protegee, Priya (Vanessa Kumar), and attempts to mould her in her own image, but is horrified when Priya eventually becomes even better at playing the boys’ game than she is.
As the central relationship of the play, Astrid and Priya’s swipes at power is a “pretty damning look” at a “system that’s built for women to fail,” Roberts says.
Roberts says it’s this look at the current system that makes Boys Will Be Boys’ subject matter very relevant to a supposedly post-feminist New Zealand.
Sophie Roberts. Photo: Supplied
While New Zealand has moved past many of the early objectives of the feminist movement - the vote being our national favourite - there’s a conception that there are no longer any obstacles to success for women in New Zealand.
But the Ministry for Women put the pay gap between genders at 11.8% in 2015. And women are sorely underrepresented in positions of power: only 14.75% of board positions are held by women in the private sector.
The misconception is no better represented than by Kevin Roberts and his recent interview with Business Insider.
According to him, the 3% Conference, a conference for female creative directors at advertising agencies, were discussing a gender diversity problem in advertising that “wasn’t really there”.
When asked about how the diversity debate rages on within the advertising industry, he replied “not in my view”.
Roberts says Kevin’s comments in the media were “incredibly ignorant”.
“We don’t like ambition on women. You have to behave like a man, or cash in on your erotic potential. Sometimes women have climb over other women. And there’s nothing to be gained from that, and everything to lose,” said Roberts.
Boys Will Be Boys’ all-female cast play a mixture of male and female characters, which means that men are everywhere but nowhere in the play. Seeing a female mouth spout sexist bile creates a disconnect so that the audience cannot dismiss “boys being boys” quite so easily.
“It’s quite full-on. People will be totally offended by a lot of what these disgusting men say. It’s humans at their worst, really.”
And the women throw it back. Astrid is a thoroughly unlikeable character in the mode of a classic anti-hero; she’s both Walter White and Tony Soprano. She has frequent soliloquies (asides) to the audience through song in the show. The insights to her character don’t soften her, but give the audience a thorough, unflinching understanding of her motives. Roberts loves her.
“We enjoy it when men do it! But there are no anti-heroines anywhere… I love women to be monsters, and more than that, that you can tell they’re enjoying being monsters.”
The play isn’t trying to find any answers for its audience. There isn’t, after all, an easy answer to the patriarchy or even casual misogyny at work.
“People stick their head in the sand because we apparently have already dealt with the woman problem. But it’s still going on for many women, and not just in a high-powered world like banking. Power dynamics between genders affect everyone.”
Boys Will Be Boys runs from 8-24 September.
