Same person. Same faultlines. Same arguments. Capital letter-phobic debbie tucker green’s new play is a noun-light, repetition-heavy look at love – a word that never appears in it. She directs her own work in an intense production that plunges the audience deep into other people’s drama.
Packed into the middle of the room on swivelly stools, you watch as three couples stride round raised stages along three walls of the clinical green space. For the furious opening exchange, it’s like being crouched under the net in a tennis match. A couple return and volley insults over the audience’s heads, outwitting each other with that kind of demented, sadistic logic that only appears midway through a row with someone you love more than anyone in the world. Lashana Lynch and Gershwyn Eustache Jnr are mesmerising, effortlessly pinning down a lifetime’s worth of frustrations: an inability to say sorry, sex-by-numbers, an unmet need to take a shit in peace.
This lengthily titled play is incredibly perceptive on the perverseness of coupledom: the way that fragile attempts to connect misfire or are ruthlessly batted down. But after that compelling opening, the same ideas return in two less satisfying iterations. Meera Syal and Gary Beadle play a different, older couple, still frustrated, with the energy gone. Syal pours everything into it, but her charisma feels underused. The final story loosely knits the previous two together – Shvorne Marks is a brilliantly sulky younger woman, daughter of the first couple, who’s driving Beadle’s character up the wall with endless requests for facetime as he struggles to break the ties with his wife.
This play’s shifting poetry can feel frustratingly loose, but its mix of hyped-up emotional angst and abstraction is precision-tooled to get to the heart of longterm-relationship-dom. And as it wears on, the title starts to look more and more ironic. This devotion might be ‘affectionate’ and ‘passionate’, but those feelings are buried as deep and invisible as underground rivers. When they’ve run their course, you’ll have seen enough to be sorely tempted to stay alone for ever.