"Growing up is murder," says a character in Golden Boys. The playwright, Paul Rothwell, was a child when the 1987 abduction and murder of Teresa Cormack dominated the news.

A challenging play in style and content, superbly directed by David Lawrence with yet another under-funded co-op of extremely talented actors (who also co-design the excellent set), it explores the effect of child murder on three young boys and their communities.

Somewhere near Christchurch 12-year-old Keith Borstall (Jack O’Donnell), a cryptic map-maker, goes missing and becomes a media celebrity in absentia, even more so when his suffocated body is found.

His best friend and Game Boy competitor Stefan (Salesi Le’ota), kept away from the funeral, remains overwhelmed by inexpressible feelings. Crispin (Alex Greig), a boy from Plimmerton with a taste for Leggo, becomes fixated by the unfolding news and it only gets worse when misguided parenting misuses fear as a teaching tool.

The life of child-performer Keiran (Julian Wilson) changes when he is selected to play Keith in a reconstruction on TV’s Crime Track, directed by a frustrated would-be art-film director (Greig). Keiran is also a core-cast member of a TV Young Entertainers-style show, along with premature sophisticate Shane (Le’ota) and promiscuous Shelley (Erin Banks).

The whole cast features in the upbeat musical routines and Banks also plays a school friend and three mums, including one whose son disappeared 26 years ago.

The dark realism of the central story is brilliantly contrasted with comedy of anguish and insight, distilled from the experiences of innocents abroad in a surreal world dominated by horrific news bulletins and light entertainment.

Once again director Lawrence draws individual excellence and ensemble cohesion from actors who delineate their characters and meld the disparate story elements with deceptive ease. With great intelligence and skill they master time, location, character and mood transitions as if their live performances were edited on film.

An early version of Golden Boys had a fraught try-out in the 2004 Fringe, compromised by Rothwell having to take over a role at the last minute. It is a testament to his commitment and professionalism, and that of all those involved in this production, that the work has matured and such excellence has been achieved despite the lack of significant funding support.

Don’t miss it.

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Golden Boys, a play that deals with the murder in Christchurch in 1989 of 12-year old Keith Borstal which sends ripples of fear, confusion and a premonition of violent death amongst three young people not concerned with the crime in any way, first appeared at Bats back in 2004. Then it lasted 50-minutes and had a cast of three actors playing eight characters. Now, in a revamped version at Circa Studio, it has been expanded to about 75 minutes with a cast of five actors playing eleven characters.

Paul Rothwell daringly tosses a mixture of theatrical styles together to tell what happens to Keith’s best friend who isn’t permitted to see the body and is left forever wondering if he really is dead, and to the boy who once played Keith in a televised reconstruction of the crime, and to the boy from Lower Hutt who believes he was the last to see Keith alive and will be the murderer’s next victim.

Into the mix go, amongst others, a scene of horrific realistic violence, a comic book caricature of well-meaning, if not very intelligent, parents, a quasi-poetic speech about the beauties of nature, some satirical song and dance numbers in a spoof of a TV show, and a moving account of a mother’s loss, and a cold-blooded description of the murder.

The mix of styles is a refreshing change, as director David Lawrence points out in the programme, from the often dull uniformity of style displayed in plays set in small New Zealand towns or student flats and confined to the problems arising from middle-class angst. However, the new version of Golden Boys is as convoluted and unclear as to what the play is driving at as the original version at Bats.

The satirical sequences about an overbearing TV director embellishing the emotions and events surrounding the crime for a documentary programme and the funny tacky song and dance sequences set in a TV studio in Avalon and a mall in Plimmerton sending up some ghastly teen variety show are hugely entertaining. However, like the comedy of the well-meaning parents trying to explain to their son the dangers that exist outside their home, it keeps the audience well away from any emotional sympathy for the three boys.

Only once, when a mother who recognizes the boy who played Keith on TV and tells him of her 9-year old son’s disappearance 26 years before, does the real emotional impact of a child’s murder really hit home. It’s a simple, tautly written scene and wrenchingly performed by Erin Banks.

Jack O’Donnell, Salesi Le’ota, Alex Greig, and Julian Wilson switch roles with practised ease and all play the boys without resorting to cliché except appropriately in the television sequences that the whole cast perform with great exuberance and a nice and exact lack of expertise, particularly during Walking on Sunshine.

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It’s a rare thing for a playwright to have the chance to rework and expand a script a couple of years after its premiere, and get in an award winning director and a top cast.  I remember Paul Rothwell’s original Golden Boys where the writer had to step in for one of the actors at the last minute. 

It was stark, spare, haunting and sadly topical. It’s still, just as sadly, very topical, this tale of young people whose lives are irreparably  damaged by the brutal death of a boy. 

Keith (Jack O’Donnell) is young for his 12 nearly 13 years, preferring childish games to playing with girls.  His best friend Stefan (Salesi Le’ota) is rushing towards adulthood at breakneck speed and Keith’s murder propels him into a life of cynicism, lies, drugs and sex, a world already embraced by fellow TV child star Shelley (Erin Banks). 

Keiran (Julian Wilson) never met but played the part of the murdered boy in a TV re-enactment,  and in doing so he lost his sense of self. Meanwhile four year old Crispin (Alex Greig) harbours a secret about Keith’s disappearance that keeps him indoors for five years.

Over the course of the play we meet a host of other characters, some victims and some perpetrators.  The finale is shocking, genuinely disturbing, and you can’t help thinking of the children whose lives have been cruelly, pointlessly taken from them and from those who love them.

Keith’s role, while pivotal, is surprisingly brief, but O’Donnell is movingly awkward and totally vulnerable. Greig and Le’ota are terrific in their dual (and contrasting) roles but Wilson too often overplays Keiran and robs the character of the sympathy he deserves.  Banks revels in a multiplicity of roles from bad teen Shelley to Crispin’s bootee-knitting mum to an old woman whose son vanished 28 years before.

However their performances and David Lawrence’s taut direction can’t save what’s become a bloated script that loses its way badly in the middle – especially the endless scenes starring the irritating child TV stars and their drug and desperation driven antics. In this extended version, The Golden Boys has lost the something that made it so haunting.

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