Debating – the very mention of it sends many people running for the psychiatrist’s couch.

And school debating, well even more, so considering the vulnerabilities of young people, the toxicity of an adversarial art form and the fear many young people might have of putting their views “out there”.

All this and more is confronted in Emmanuel Mattana’s play Trophy Boys, a funny-serious satirical comedy based around the perils of school debating, coming here as part of Canberra Theatre’s Valence series.

This is one of those productions where the girls play the boys – very privileged boys from the posh fictional St Imperium College. 

Given that playwright Mattana went to Sydney Girls’ High School and has made public mention of Sydney Grammar School where former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was a senior debater, it’s not too hard to work out where she’s coming from.

Rock musician Steve Kilbey has been forthcoming when talking of his school debating experiences with Mr Turnbull, but when asked what she knows, Mattana says: “No comment.”

In real life she was an elite debater and, elsewhere, so was the director of the show, former Canberran Marni Mount, who played Queen Catherine in Lakespeare’s Henry V earlier this year. Coincidentally, the pair had met at a national debating tournament when Mattana was in year 11. 

After school, Mattana left Sydney for the lead role of Marnie on the TV series Mustang FC and theatre studies in Melbourne, and put debating to one side.

But later, when the story emerged of former Attorney-General Christian Porter and his alleged conduct while a member of his university debating team, it all came back to her.

That included the time a Grammar boy claimed that the only reason they lost a debate against her team was because they were distracted by her legs. 

Thrown into the mix was Mattana’s own sexual orientation, so Trophy Boys, which she says is incredibly funny, has a casting gender twist to make the point. 

“I loved debating because I was a very political and outspoken teenager… I could air my opinions and understand and undertake arguments about current affairs every week,” she tells me. 

“I could learn about ideas and flex some intellectual muscle.”

To get up and speak uninterrupted for eight minutes, she believes, was empowering for a young woman. 

“This is a place where you can take on the boys, who are often intellectual show-offs.”

Time for me to confess that I was a school debater and she’s right about that. 

For some people, debating is a lifelong obsession, but not for Mattana who, totally absorbed in theatre, had almost forgotten about the debating world. But when the Porter story surfaced, she suddenly found she had a script. 

The hit play is set during the one-hour prep window before the Grand Finale of the Year 12 Interschool Debating Tournament.

The posh Imperium boys are prepping against their sister-school rival and have to argue the affirmative proposition “that feminism has failed women”.

“We are with them, we see the chasm between what they think and how they act as they worry about how they will be perceived,” Mattana says.

Presumably the other team, who will debate that feminism has not failed women, has the easier side of it, but we don’t see the girls.

“Emmanuelle’s play is a masterful interrogation of the ways that entitlement, abuse, and absolution are tied up with one another,” director Mount says. 

“I hope this play makes you laugh, and I hope it makes you angry.”

“But it’s a comedy, it’s absolutely a comedy,” Mattana assures me. “It’s done in camp-drag as girls play the boys… it’s very, very funny.”

She performs as one of the characters, along with fellow actors Gaby Seow, Fran Sweeney-Nash and Leigh Lule, she uncovers the toxicity they see in Australian private schools. 

Naturally Mattana’s not about to tell us exactly what happens at the end, but she will say that in the middle of the prep, it emerges that one of the boys has committed a sexual assault, but which one?

Trophy Boys, The Courtyard Studio, August 5-10.