Gareth's Culture and Travel Blog

This was Sam Steiner’s playwriting debut, premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2015 a year after he graduated. Not many first plays make it to a West End stage, but here this is 7.5 years later, a showcase leveraged by two TV actors with big followings.

At first, we seem to be witnessing snatches of the evolving relationship between Bernadette, a family lawyer, and Oliver, a musician, who met at a pet cemetery! It’s non-linear, like a jigsaw puzzle for you to piece together yourself. Then a political dimension is introduced, as we learn about the proposed Quietude Act, which will limit everyone to 140 words a day (as it happens, also the original Twitter word limit). The relationship and the politics merge as Oliver becomes a campaigner against and Bernadette more circumspect. Each scene is little more than soundbites of conversation, eventually referring to and mirroring the new rules. It’s played in front of designer Robert Jones’ wall of life, lots of everyday objects which are variously illuminated.

It’s a clever piece, maybe too clever for its own good, performed with great precision by Jenna Coleman and Aidan Turner (though you’d never know if they weren’t word perfect!). Jones’ design is very effective in making what is a chamber piece work in a proscenium theatre, and Josie Rourke’s staging does animate the play. If you feel a ‘but’ coming on, you’d be right! It’s billed as a Rom Com, but there isn’t enough Rom or Com; there was a lack of chemistry and laughs were few and far between on the night I went. It’s hard to overcome the implausibility and unenforcability of the Quietude law, to the point that it gets in the way, and the staccato style eventually becomes irritating. It’s only 90 minutes long but it doesn’t really sustain its length.

There isn’t enough new writing in the West End, so that makes it welcome, but it’s only fair to compare it with the others, like Best of Enemies and The Doctor, particularly at £85 stalls non-premium for a two-hander, and on that basis it doesn’t hold up. It has its moments, but I left the theatre still hungry.