After a sold-out season in New York, the Trophy Boys returned home to tour in Australia, arriving at Riverside theatre on August 6th to a tame opening night.

The set up was exciting and promising. A cast of female and non-binary actors expertly portray a private boys debating team, trapped in a room with the looming assignment “feminism has failed women: affirmative”.

What follows is exactly what you would expect. About 40 minutes of the four boys desperately trying to find a winning argument that doesn’t cost them being labelled misogynistic pratts and all the while revealing, in not so subtle outbursts, the hypocrisy of their supposed feminist stances.

This leads to the twist half-way through where (spoiler alert), they find out a news article has been released accusing a member of their debating team of sexual assault. From here, the play adopts a much darker tone as the audience is privy to the sinister truths that hide beneath their normalized behaviours and attitudes. These revelations allow for some of the strongest and most captivating performances throughout the show, particularly when Owen, the most convincing feminist on the team, is accused by the other boys as being the assaulter. As the boys are forced to confront the potential consequences of their own actions, the hierarchy and dynamics of the group pull and shift as they each desperately cling to solutions.

However, ultimately I struggled to feel any degree of true shock or betrayal at these revelations given that their characterisation in the first act was so satirised that it was difficult to connect with any of the boys as fully fledged characters. It could be argued that this was exactly the point, that the comedy demonstrates just how easily we accept and infantilise the misogynistic behaviour of young boys as just ‘boys will be boys’. Yet at points it felt that the story ceded to cheap laughs over building characters that we can emotionally invest in (ridiculous and immature as they may be). Whilst hilarious at first, eventually the satire began to feel repetitive, superficial and ultimately unsatisfying.