Park Theatre

This new dark comedy from James McDermott follows a couple who’ve been together for 29 years and who don’t much care for each other, but have succeeded in rubbing along… until the pandemic locks them at home together with no other distractions. Scott Le Crass directs Kacey Ainsworth and Liam Tobin as disintegrating couple Anne and Don. 

American writer Neil LaBute invariably takes big swings in his plays. Debuting at the Park Theatre, his first UK premiere in an age is no exception. At a time of intense debate around euthanasia and assisted dying in the real world, he collides Brad and Jodie, an American couple who are facing her terminal cancer, with Tate, the man Jodie wants to kill her. If you want nuanced debate, look elsewhere. LaBute blasts clear through this. As Jodie, Justina Kehinde brings a powerful rawness to her character’s frustration and anger at her situation. But – no spoilers – the solution we’re eventually presented with is so convoluted and elaborate that it drowns out any believable character development. This isn’t helped by a script that repeatedly circles the same points. Instead, as is so often the case with LaBute’s work, Jodie feels like a catalyst for two men to work through their manliness. Middle-class Brad and his reluctance to help Jodie end her life is juxtaposed with the working-class Tate, a mechanic with a troubled family history who went to school with her and is willing to do what Brad won’t. Morgan Watkins brings an intriguing unpredictability to Tate, bristling and coiling him like a spring as he comes into conflict with Archie Backhouse’s condescending Brad. Under the play’s increasingly ludicrous set-up, there are some trenchant themes about small-town America, classism and lack of opportunity. But these are drenched by the pissing contest the script devolves into....

Acclaimed in playwright Mark O’Halloran’s native Ireland – where it premiered in 2021 – Converations After Sex follows the intimate connections and unnamed woman makes with a carousel of strange men who she sleeps with in what’s billed as an exploration of ‘the nature of grief, loneliness and promiscuity’. Jess Edwards directs a cast headed by Olivia Lindsay.