The boys are not all right – inside the Canberra play taking aim at the manosphere

Posted on 27 May, 2026

An online world where men reign supreme. Where they are fit and powerful, rich and muscular. Where they have wealth, status and success with women. The manosphere feels like a distant world when it’s a few simple clicks away.

It’s making good boys into dangerous men – and one Canberra play is asking the question on everyone’s mind: what are we going to do about it?

But The Good Boy Game isn’t about clear lines and a moral high ground. Instead, everyone is a victim, and everyone is a monster. After all, what parents would lock their child away to de-radicalise them?

Written by American playwright Patrick Vermillion and beginning with a bang, The Good Boy Game takes place in a quiet, affluent corner of New Jersey, where two liberal arts academics discover something unthinkable: their teenage son has been planning a school shooting.

Armed with a therapist’s points-based rewards system, and their own DIY de-radicalisation plan, Mary-Beth and Sam are determined to scrub the hate out of their son James – one ‘good boy’ point and gold star at a time.

At a distance, it sounds absurd and it’s a premise that feels deeply uncomfortable, but as the couple is forced to face the part they played in creating James, it’s dangerously close to reality – exactly the line the play is determined to walk.

“I was immediately taken by how it is very critical of the radicalisation of young men, but it’s also very critical about how our desire to fix them by playing nice isn’t doing anything,” explains director Caitlin Baker.

“It’s also – pardon my language – batshit crazy, and I think we need more crazy theatre.”

Joining the likes of Adolescence and The Manosphere – which have both already exposed and explored the pipeline of misogyny, resentment, and internet‑fuelled extremism shaping a generation of boys – The Good Boy Game pushes the realm of reality.

Pulling apart the absurdity of the manosphere by pushing the characters to the nth degree, Caitlin says it’s this distinction that separates it from documentaries and other dramas.

“You couldn’t ever imagine two parents actually ever locking their son in the attic, but the play cracks opens a world where if we can believe that, if we can accept that maybe there’s a way for us to save this good boy, maybe it can give us an interpretive space to take some of these conversations to the extreme,” says Caitlin.

“The Good Boy Game is much more concerned with parents and children, and the way we raise them. You can try your absolute hardest to raise someone, but sometimes the world has its own hand at that.”

Part satire, part warning, and part catharsis, the black comedy also closes the distance between the audience and the content.

The result? A world that feels uncomfortably close to home, even if the play is set in America.

“Theatre has a social contract that I love…so when you bring up topics like sex, violence, misogyny, hate and love, when we watch a mother talk to her son about where does he get these ideas, and we watch a son talk back about the worldview he’s been taught to have…it forces us to remain in that world,” says Caitlin.

“We cannot pause and we cannot turn it off, which I think is a really important part of having this discussion.”

Running for a strictly limited time at The Q from Thursday 18 until Saturday 20 June, Caitlin hopes that audience members leave The Good Boy Game wanting to talk to the young boys in their life.

She also hopes that it inspires people to pay closer to where young boys are learning about the world and truly question whether they can meet violence with niceness and goodness or if a more confronting plan – like that of Mary-Beth and Sam’s – is needed.

“The play like really asks us to listen to them closer…we need to look at what they’re consuming, and we need to make sure that when we’re sharing these things about fighting misogyny and equal rights,” explains Caitlin.

“Every nice thing that we want the children of tomorrow to have, we need to make sure that we’re being really loud and emphatic about that, because there are some really dangerous voices out there that we have to try and drown out.”

Working closely with local actors Giuliana Baggoley, Bruce Hardie, Alastair McKenzie and Elaine Noon to bring the play to life, Caitlin admits that while rehearsing The Good Boy Game there some moments when they had to pause and re-group.

Diving into such a sensitive and timely topic, she says that they’ve had to lean into how truly funny the Good Boy Game is. Because if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.

“Patrick’s written a very incisive play that is quite brutal at times, but what makes it such a fabulous play is the fact that it is so funny…the fact that it invites us to laugh and then reflect on why we laughed, as well as our own culpability as audience members finding something funny is part of the dramatic world of the play,” says Caitlin.

“I like it so much because at least when I’m talking about the rise of radicalisation, I just get to laugh about it as well.”

It’s a fine line The Good Boy Game walks. But as a furious, funny, and deeply uncomfortable interrogation of a crisis that touches us all, it’s a line that needs to be explored.

“It’s a balancing act: we’re trying to crack open something we’re all deeply concerned about, but at the end of the day, when you’re making theatre, there’s a fine line you have to walk. You have this desire that every piece of art and every bit of commentary you make is somehow going to solve the world when you’re politically minded,” says Caitlin.

“As a cast, we always come back to the fact that we’re telling a story that exists in that world, explores that world, and gives us characters to help crack it open. All we can do is tell a story and hope people listen – then maybe the people listening go out and change the world a little bit.”

The truth is The Good Boy Game won’t appeal to everyone. Maybe it will be too removed from reality, too close to reality or too terrifying for audiences to sit still.

But when extremist ideology is bleeding out of screens and into schools, pubs, parks, and into politics, it’s a story worth telling.

“I have a firm belief that if everybody likes your work, it’s probably not that impactful, or you probably haven’t said something that brave. Nobody’s going to like everything,” says Caitlin.

“It’s confronting and it’s a lot harsher than a lot of the stuff we might see in Canberra. I’m interested to see how people take it.”