What I liked
I liked the relationship the actors created. They’re both strong performers and it’s always great for an audience to be able to relax because they can sense that the performers know what they’re doing.
I wasn’t keen on the writing for most of the first scene – I felt that the way the author brought the characters to the point where they decide to sleep with each other was contrived. However, after that point, I was quickly drawn into the story and appreciated the fact that both characters had complexity enough that neither of them was the villain. nor the hero, of the piece. We’ve all done things we regret and we all would like to be forgiven and not have our past actions/behaviours define us. The play very effectively explores the notion of why we help others, why we accept help from others and what we feel when that help is used as emotional blackmail when things go wrong.
There are some extremely powerful scenes when the actors delve into the tricky argument of blaming and taking responsibility for their own parts in the scenario.
What I didn't like
Most of my negatives are directorial choices. I have an aversion to actors facing forward as they talk to characters behind them, with the sole purpose of allowing the audience to see their face. There were a lot of times when they moved constantly, almost as if they were fearful that just sitting still and having the interesting conversations weren’t enough to hold our attention. I’d love to see the next version of this play being much, much stiller, with the actors(and the director) trusting that their dialogue/conversation is interesting enough rather than constantly moving around the space and finding inventive ways of sitting on a sofa. This mostly happened in the first scene and as a result I was drawn in more when they moved only when truly motivated to do so, and just talked to each other to talk (or at least didn’t face the audience in a way that made me feel like they were doing it because the director had told them to do so).
Despite these negatives, it was still a great show and I was holding back the tears at the end of it!
My overall impression
Well acted, with some very touching moments. I heard many comments during the festival about how long a Fringe show ‘should’ be which I personally find bizarre – as Peter Schaeffer has Mozart stating in his play Amadeus when the King says there are ‘too many notes’ – “there are as many notes as there need to be!” Similarly, this play is as long as it needs to be and they held the audience’s attention throughout.
