THE BROTHERS GRIM
Author: PETER HOLMES
Date: 22/02/1991
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
 
IN A small Randwick building the incessant screaming pierces a subdued suburban morning. Beer cans are being thrown across 
the floor and a pregnant woman is being abused. The anger in the three Sprague brothers is at boiling point. You wonder when 
a local is going to call the police. 

Next door, in a cramped little room, sits the creator of this mayhem, playwright Gordon Graham. His reserved, quiet manner 
is in stark contrast to the constant thread of fear and violence that controls the atmosphere just along the corridor. 

Graham's play, The Boys, is in the final stages of preparation. A sometimes vicious, always threatening production, it will 
no doubt polarise its audience when it opens later this month at the Stables Theatre in Kings Cross. 

When you portray a culture that allows men to control women, abuse women and eventually mutilate a female body, the reaction 
in the audience will be extreme. 

For Graham, the need to write such a brutal play came simply from reading about similar disturbing events over the years. 

"The horror grew to the extent that it invaded my consciousness," he says. "I was constantly appalled, and the play was an 
attempt to understand the forces that produce these brutal rapes and murders, the culture that produces it and to look at 
people touched by that and see how they cope or don't cope. 

The Boys is set in a backyard. One of the Sprague brothers, Brett, (portrayed by David Wenham) has just returned from a stint 
in jail for minor assault. 

He is joined by his brothers, Glenn (David Field) and Stevie (Peter Lehner), who proceed to drink, yell, get paranoid and eventually 
furious with their girlfriends, for acts as innocent as going for a walk. 

While Graham grapples with and eventually is scathing of the culture that promotes this behaviour, he also looks at the 
background of the individuals that allows this permeation. "I think we see them inheriting a very aggressive culture, that 
has inbuilt in it a strong hostility towards women," he says. "I think I've tried to show various things about their 
behaviour that are part and parcel of that culture; the things they do to kill time, the things they say about women in 
the street, the stuff that is self-perpetuating. 

"It's certainly not an attempt to justify. I think ... I suppose in the end I am condemning the culture from which that 
grows. Condemning that culture is not saying 'Those poor blokes, they didn't have any choice'." 

The characters speak in slang and have poor diction (the word "ask" becomes"aksk"), which is realistic, yet it opens the 
door for accusations of stereotyping a certain socioeconomic background. 

"I can't say it hadn't crossed my mind that someone was going to say this is blaming it all on one particular group of 
people," he says. "I was brought up in a pretty rough outer suburb in Perth, and the characters in this play, the way 
they speak, is something I've been developing dramatically for a long time. 

"It is not a way of saying, 'It's them out there, blame it on the western suburbs'. Far from it. It happens to be that 
the characters who emerge over a long period, who were involved in a number of cases that were highly visible, were 
actually from that milieu, but not exclusively so." 

The Boys opens at the Stables Theatre next Thursday. Previews on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tickets for previews $8. Other 
sessions $18 for adults and $12 concession. Bookings on 361 3817.