Melissa Bubnic's Boys Will Be Boys with Pippa Grandison at The Street Theatre

Although her "play with songs". Boys Will Be Boys, is set in the world of currency trading, playwright Melissa Bubnic -winner of the Sydney Theatre Company's Patrick White Award in 2010 - was inspired to write it by something that took place in a different, though in some ways similar, world. And it happened in Canberra.

"The play is about how women negotiate power in a male-dominated workplace," Bubnic says.

She recalls an incident that took place several years ago at the Australian Defence Force Academy where a female cadet having consensual sex with a fellow cadet was not aware he was broadcasting the act via Skype to cadets in another room.

"It became a scandal," she says.

Bubnic thought it would make thought-provoking material for a play and took the notion to the Sydney Theatre Company when Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett were in charge. They were interested and the resulting work, Boys Will Be Boys, premiered there in 2015 and was produced in Britain and New Zealand in 2016. It will now receive its Canberra premiere at The Street Theatre.

Bubnic changed the setting from the military to a currency trading firm because she felt the former was something outside most people's experience. The business world, on the other hand, she felt was would be more recognisable and accessible to audiences and she could still use the real-life case, as she intended, as a jumping-off point for the story she wanted to tell.

In Boys Will Be Boys, all the characters - male as well as female - are played by women. It's not just a gimmick, Bubnic says.

"It goes to one of the play's central questions - what it is to be a man, what is to be a woman," she says.

"Men are allowed to behave in certain ways - but is there anything really natural about that behaviour?"

The play is set in a British trading firm with two women featured its male-dominated world.

"Astrid is a broker at the top of her profession. She takes on a protege, young Priya - they're the only two women in the firm," Bubnic says.

But this is no All About Eve situation where the younger woman immediately begins scheming to usurp her mentor. Instead, the crunch comes when Priya is raped by one of the men in the firm and comes to Astrid for advice and support. What counsel will the older woman offer her?

The all-female cast was one of the things about the play that appealed to The Street Theatre's artistic director, Caroline Stacey, who's directing the production.

"It's a terrific vehicle for the women that we have in Canberra," Stacey says.

She says when she first read the satirical play, she found it "distasteful but incredibly funny ... You're caught up in this exaggerated world. ..It gives woman permission to be unlovable."

Stacey likens it to the movie The Wolf of Wall Street: "They're compelling characters who do these dreadful things - you can't take your eyes off them...It asks the audience, 'Are we OK with this?"'

Among the other things the play also asks, she says, is What would you compromise in yourself to get ahead? and What would you give up to get ahead?

Sometimes the women will use their feminity as a means to get what they want if it works; other times it works against them in the men's world of the firm. And Priya, being Bangladeshi, also finds her ethnicity is another card that can be played against her or in her favour, depending on the circumstances, Stacey says.

Commenting on the recent sexual harassment and rape allegations that have surfaced about Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein she says it has taken many years for them to become public and be called out because of the power he wielded and because people were afraid speaking up might damage their careers - even if they were the victims. And in the world of Boys Will Be Boys there are also different perspectives about the value of speaking out even about something as serious as sexual assault.

"It's a world of moral ambiguity about whether something is right or wrong," Stacey says.

Musical theatre star Pippa Grandison, whose shows have included Wicked, plays Astrid. says her character is "so cool, callous and cold - she has to be in some ways, to survive".

She says Astrid doesn't see Priya as a rival - "she's so confident" - but tries to shape her in her own image, having paved the way for another woman to rise up in the firm.

While she can't afford to display any vulnerability at the firm, behaving very much like one of the boys, Astrid does reveal another side to herself in the fourth-wall-breaking monologues and musical numbers she has, Grandison says.

In these scenes, she is calmer - "still sweary, but more languid" - and occasionally a tiny chink in her armour appears.

"You do see a soft side to her, but she doesn't give it up easily."

Backed by the other characters, she sings 1950s and '60s numbers made famous by singers like Etta James, Nina Simone and Rosemary Clooney

Grandison says Astrid was "a great challenge - the furthest from me of any character I've ever played.

"She's so confident that her vulnerability, if there's any at all, is so deep she can't reach it."